Medial Temporal Lab, Lund University

Gustaf Rådman

Doctoral student

Gustaf became a PhD student in the MTLab the fall of 2023 after having worked as a research assistant in the group. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Psychology from Stockholm University.

His PhD project centers around the structural and functional integrity of the medial temporal lobe in aging where he is supervised by Laura Wisse, Rosanna Olsen at Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Nicola Spotorno at the Institute for Clinical Sciences in Lund, and Mikael Johansson at the Department of Psychology in Lund. He aims to use a broad range of tools including structural and functional MR, eye-tracking, and behavioral experiments to assess how changes across these metrics relate to each other.

Outside science, Gustaf loves sport climbing and running, and he has two dogs! He also enjoy playing several musical instruments including piano and violin.

Amanda Annettesdotter

Doctoral student

Amanda started her PhD studies in the MTLab in August 2023, with Laura Wisse as her main supervisor. She’s also involved in the BioFINDER group and is co-supervised by Oskar Hansson. Amanda has a bachelor’s degree in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind from the University of Skövde, and a master’s degree in cognitive science from Umeå university. After her master’s, she worked as a research assistant at the Umeå Center for Brain Imaging (UFBI), where she for example collected functional brain imaging data in a memory association project.

Amanda’s PhD is focused on the accumulation of pathologies and neurodegeneration in the brain, especially in the amygdala and its subregions, using both postmortem data to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of neuropathologies, as well as in vivo datasets to characterize the relations between imaging markers of the amygdala and changes in cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms.

When not working, Amanda enjoys running, doing yoga, reading books and writing poetry.

Lijun An

Postdoctoral fellow

Lijun grew up in China and got his Ph.D. in engineering at the National University of Singapore. He then moved to Lund University for postdoctoral training with Jacob Vogel and Laura Wisse.

Lijun’s research interests focus on developing machine learning models to analyse multi-omics data (e.g., multi-modality brain images and proteomics) to deepen our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. He believes that future scientific breakthroughs will rely on algorithms to explore these massive multi-omics data. Currently, he is working on several exciting projects with incredible lab mates. One of the projects involves developing unsupervised models on a high-resolution postmortem dataset (~20 μm, 20 – 30 TB) to segment the medial temporal lobe. He is also working on a proteomic taxonomy project, where we use deep learning to identify biotypes of neurodegenerative diseases from over 70,000 plasma proteomics samples.

In his spare time, he enjoys hiking and writing humorous Chinese poems.

Jonathan Rittmo

Doctoral student

Jonathan’s PhD project focus on functional connectivity changes in the brain, with a special focus on the medial temporal lobe across the lifespan both in health and across the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum. The aim is to unravel how, why and when these alterations manifest, and whether they drive changes in cognitive functioning. While spending most of his time constructing digital models and methodologies, Jonathan also enjoys hands-on building in the physical world, and views the entire scientific endeavor as a collective construction project.

Jonathan joined the lab 2023 and is involved in the BioFINDER study as a PhD student. His main supervisor is Jacob Vogel from the DeMON lab, with Laura Wisse and Oskar Hansson as co-supervisors. He has a background in Cognitive Science, Neuropsychology and Statistics with degrees from Gothenburg, Edinburgh and Lund University. Here, his main focus has been on statistical methodology.

Yasmine Salman

Doctoral student

Yasmine is a PhD candidate from UCLouvain (Belgium), visiting the Medial Temporal Lab to deepen her expertise in high-resolution ex vivo imaging of the medial temporal lobe. Her doctoral research, supervised by Bernard Hanseeuw, investigates the impact of tau pathology on cortical atrophy, using distinct in vivo and postmortem datasets. At Lund, under Laura Wisse’s guidance, she manually segments postmortem MRI scans to study the impact of early tau pathology on medial temporal lobe atrophy.

She holds a master’s degree in biomedical sciences with a specialization in neuroscience from UCLouvain. Her interests focus on early structural changes in Alzheimer’s disease and the contribution of co-pathologies to cortical atrophy.

Outside the lab, Yasmine enjoys long walks in nature, discovering new cultures through travel, cooking for her family, and staying active, especially playing basketball, a sport she practiced for 15 years. She is known for her enthusiasm and contagious optimism.

Aleta de Ruiter

Doctoral student

Aleta is a PhD student at the Paris Brain Institute. She obtained her master’s degree in Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Amsterdam.

Aleta’s PhD research focuses on characterizing the deposition patterns of tau, amyloid-β, α-synuclein, and TDP-43, as well as their synergies, within medial temporal lobe subregions using postmortem tissue from donors with different neurodegenerative diseases and examining how these patterns relate to markers of neurodegeneration. She further extends this work in vivo by investigating how proteinopathy biomarkers, individually and in combination, relate to structural MRI measures of medial temporal lobe subregions and to memory performance in patients with different types of dementia. Aleta is supervised by Laura Wisse, Nicolas Villain from the Paris Brain Institute and Robin de Flores from the Université de Caen Normandie.

Beyond academia, Aleta enjoys running, cycling, and swimming. She aims to complete a full triathlon one day.