Vanessa is currently a postdoctoral research fellow with Lorenz Deserno at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital Würzburg, Germany 

Before this, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Donders Institute in the Learning and Decision Making Lab from 2018-2020 with which she still remains affiliated. During that time, she was supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship funded by the German Research Foundation. 

She completed her Phd in clinical psychology at the University of Mainz and the University of Heidelberg in Germany, both under the supervision of Michèle Wessa, investigating the structural and functional underpinnings of reward learning and decision-making in bipolar-I disorder patients, while also training as a cognitive behavioural therapist

As a clinical neuroscientist and psychotherapist, Vanessa is interested in better understanding the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms underlying learning and decision-making both in health and disease with a particular focus on the compulsive and impulsive spectrum. For her research, she employs computational modelling as well as structural and functional neuroimaging and psychopharmacological interventions.

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