Laura Wisse, PhD

Laura Wisse obtained her master’s degree in clinical neuropsychology in 2010, at Leiden University, the Netherlands. During her master’s program, she did a clinical internship at the Geriatrics Department of Medical Center Alkmaar, the Netherlands, where she learned to perform cognitive testing, part of the diagnostic process for patients with memory and other cognitive complaints. In January 2011, she started her PhD studies at Utrecht University Medical Center in the Netherlands, focusing on ultra-high resolution imaging of the brain. She focused on the hippocampus, a brain region of great importance for memory and therefore also of importance for aging and disease. Laura developed a new method to measure smaller regions within the hippocampus to study this brain region in more detail and learn more about the effects of aging, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and depression on these regions. After her PhD studies, Laura became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. David Wolk and Dr. Paul Yushkevich. She continues her work on improving methods to measure these small regions of the hippocampus and studying brain changes in aging and AD.