Vanessa Scholz

Welcome! I am Vanessa Scholz and I'm 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. 

After completing my Phd and getting certified as a clinical psychotherapist in Germany, I went on to do a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in the Learning and Decision Making Lab (PI: Hanneke den Ouden) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Before this, I completed my Phd in clinical psychology at the University of Mainz and the University of Heidelberg, both under the supervision of Michèle Wessa, investigating the structural and functional underpinnings of reward learning and decision-making in bipolar-I disorder patients employing a mixture of fMRI, DTI, behavioral and neuropsychological tests 

As a clinical neuroscientist, I am interested in better understanding the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms underlying learning and decision-making both in health and disease. For my research, I use computational modelling of behaviour as well as  structural and functional neuroimaging and psychopharmacological interventions.