Antonia Kaiser, PhD

Antonia Kaiser is a postdoctoral researcher at the CIBM Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) within the MRI EPFL section. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Osnabrück in Germany and completed her Master’s degree in Brain and Cognitive Science with a specialization in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam

Antonia pursued her PhD at the Amsterdam University Medical Center (UMC), focusing on the effects of emotion dysregulation and medication in ADHD, as well as the impact of exercise on the brain in healthy volunteers. Her research utilized comprehensive structural and functional MRI methods and was supervised by Prof. dr. Liesbeth Reneman, Prof. dr. Paul J. Lucassen, Dr. Anouk Schrantee, and Dr. Marco Bottelier. She successfully defended her thesis, “Challenging the Brain: Insights from Comprehensive Structural & Functional MRI Studies,” in January 2023.

In addition to her PhD work, Antonia was involved in a collaborative project applying deep neural networks to improve the quality of MR spectroscopy data at the Amsterdam UMC. She also served as a part-time lecturer for the Bachelor’s Program in Psychobiology at the University of Amsterdam, teaching various topics ranging from Philosophy to Neurophysiology.

Since February 2023, Antonia has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at CIBM, focusing on advancing functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy to better detect neurometabolic alterations in (psychiatric) disorders under the guidance of PI Lijing Xin. Her broad research interests include clinically applied cognitive neuroimaging and multimodal investigations to deepen the understanding of the neuromechanisms underlying cognitive function and dysfunction, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches and viewing research challenges from multiple perspectives.