Dr. phil. Vanessa Scholz
Vanessa Scholz is a psychologist, licensed CBT psychotherapist, and about to become a physician. After studying psychology in Marburg, she completed her PhD at the University of Mainz. Following postdoctoral training at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (Netherlands), supported by a fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), she joined Lorenz’s group at the University Hospital Würzburg as a postdoc. Alongside her research activities, she completed her medical training and will be pursuing clinical training in child and adolescent psychiatry.
Her research aims to understand how alterations in learning, motivation, and decision-making contribute to psychiatric symptoms across development. By combining behavioural experiments, computational modelling, psychopharmacological interventions and neuroimaging, she studies how motivational biases, cognitive control, and neuromodulatory systems shape behaviour and individual vulnerability to mental health problems. Her current work focuses on ADHD, developmental changes in goal-directed decision-making, and transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology. Her work seeks to bridge basic neuroscience and clinical psychiatry, with the long-term goal of developing more mechanistically informed approaches to diagnosis, treatment prediction, and personalised interventions.
Outside the lab, Vanessa enjoys hiking, travelling, and exploring new perspectives—whether on mountain trails, different cultures, or through interdisciplinary collaboration.