Dr. Priska Zuber
Postdoc, Neuroscientist
I have always been very curious in understanding how people work. I was in high school when I was trying to answer the question “Is it possible to wake up at a specific time when going to bed with a resolution for this wake-up time?". By monitoring the sleep, collecting data and performing statistical analyses I did not yet fully understand at the time that this school project I conducted on my classmates was the first research project I did.
Only during my studies I realized that I was performing research at that time already and that thinking about research questions, organizing study projects, analyzing and interpreting data and writing up results were things I really like doing. This is still true until now, I like to understand how we, especially our brain, works and if something is not working, how we can change it to the better. Being a researcher allows me to be curious, think creatively about solutions and while doing so hopefully help other people.
About me
I completed my Bachelor (2015) and Master (2017) degrees in Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In 2018, I was awarded with a Doc.CH grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to pursue my PhD in Cognitive Neurosciences at the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Basel. I completed my dissertation entitled “Brain Plasticity Induced by Motor and Cognitive Interventions in Health and Pathology” (summa cum laude) in July 2021.
After my PhD studies, I spent six months (July 2021 - December 2021) as a visiting researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. Being awarded with a postdoctoral grant by the Research Fund for Excellent Junior Researchers of the University of Basel, I returned to Basel in 2022 and pursued my research at the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience until October 2022. In 2022, I was awarded with a SNSF Postdoc.Mobility fellowship and I am since November 2022 a postdoctoral research fellow in the MindsLab at the Health, Medical and Neuropsychology Unit at Leiden University.
As a balance to my daily life in the office, I like to be outdoors as much as possible. Long walks with my dog Quincy at the beach in Katwijk near Leiden, in the Swiss mountains or to explore cities help me to recharge and think creatively. I love to explore different countries, cultures and food, which I do by visiting art museums, great restaurants and traveling.