Hi! I have joined Prof. Mona Garvert’s lab as a doctoral student to work on an exciting project at the intersection of cognitive and clinical neuroscience. The project is co-led by Dr. Maximilian Wessel at the university hospital of Würzburg. We are hoping to understand the interplay of striatal and hippocampal systems in decision-making, both in healthy people and in people with Parkinson’s disease. What I am particularly looking forward to is getting hands-on experience with sophisticated methodology including fMRI, computational modeling, and temporal interference stimulation.

It is not the first time for me to deal with questions of hippocampal-striatal interplay: My master’s thesis was a coordinate-based meta-analysis of fMRI activations occurring within a pre-defined subpart of the putamen during episodic memory retrieval. Despite being rather small-scale and abstract by itself, this thesis project has sparked my interest in large-scale, automated knowledge synthesis as a means to find reliable and valid answers to scientific questions of practical interest. My ideal professional future would be working as an open scientist in an open and collaborative research community that also effectively communicates with the general public. If you share my vision (or just wish to contact me for any other reason), please reach out at Ludwig_J5@ukw.de.