Leona acquired her bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in neuroscience at the Universities of Bern and Fribourg. During her bachelor’s degree, she worked at the University Hospital Basel in Roland Bingisser’s team, aiming to improve discharge communication at the emergency station. As a result of her bachelor’s thesis and a subsequent position in the lab from Fred Mast, she finally decided to take up statistics.
Thus, she focused on research methods and neuropsychology in her master’s degree at the University of Bern. Due to her increasing excitement about the cellular and pharmacological processes of the brain, she interrupted her studies in Bern for a second master’s in Neuroscience at Trinity College in Dublin. Leona wrote her thesis about the cellular response to a potentially memory enhancing compound under the supervision of Aine Kelly.
She returned to Bern, where she worked for Katharina Henke in sleep and memory research and investigated the EEG response to auditory stimulation during deep sleep as part of her master’s thesis. Beneath her studies and work at university, she worked as junior data scientist.
In February 2022, Leona started her PhD at the University of Lausanne as part of the statistical genetics group. She will be analyzing the biological manifestation of genetic and environmental factors associated with sporadic Alzheimer’s disease.
In her spare time, she enjoys running/cycling/skiing through mountains, reading Sally Rooney’s novels, and eating out in company.