Short Curriculum Vitae

email: l.gerritsen@uu.nl

Currently Dr. Gerritsen holds a Associate professor position at the department of Clinical Psychology in Utrecht, where she is part of the Experimental Psychopathology lab.

Apart from her research she also enjoys teaching. She serves as a member of the Educational Committee for the Psychology Bachelor program and is the examinator for the Master program of Clinical Psychology. Gives lectures on mood disorders, somatic symptom disorders, genetics and neuropsychiatry and is the course coordinator of the Diagnostics in Clinical Psychology course.

Dr. Gerritsen studied  how the brain can be seen as an endophenotype for the susceptibility to mood disorders at the department of Psychiatry at the VU Medical Center in Amsterdam.  For this research she received a ZonMW Veni grant.

Dr. Gerritsen received a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship from the EU to study stress and the aging brain at the department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. There she collaborated closely with professor Nancy Pedersen and professor Laura Fratiglioni from the Aging Research Center.

Dr. Gerritsen did her first post-doc at the Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging and the department of Psychiatry of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, under supervision of professor Guillén Fernández and professor Indira Tendolkar. There she worked on the Brain Imaging Genetics project to study how genetic variation can explain inter-individual differences in brain and behavior. 

Dr. Gerritsen received her PhD  at Utrecht University under the supervision of professor Yolanda van der Graaf, professor Brenda Penninx, Dr. Hannie Comijs and Dr. Mirjam Geerlings. The title of her PhD thesis was Stress, the brain and cognition, in which she disentangled the relation between depression, life stressors and brain aging.

Dr. Gerritsen received her Bachelor in Psychology and Master in Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam and then followed a Master in Neuroscience and a Master in Clinical Epidemiology at Utrecht University.

2023 Dynamics of Youth 'Oral contraception in adolescents and internalizing symptoms'

2021 Alzheimer NL research grant 'Sex differences in dementia incidence'
in collaboration with UMC Utrecht, Dr. M. Geerlings

2020 Forte Grant - Swedish Research Foundation 'Work stress and brain aging'
in collaboration with Dr. Hui-Xin Wang, Stockholm University

2019 UU Research Grant 'Impact of contraceptive use on brain and emotion regulation'

2018 Alzheimer NL research grant 'Late-life depression and brain aging'
in collaboration with UMC Utrecht, Dr. M. Geerlings

2014 Forte Grant - Swedish Research Foundation 'Healthy Aging'
in collaboration with prof Nancy Pedersen, Karolinska Insititute

2013 ZonMW Veni grant 'The stressed brain'

2013 travel grant Society of Biological Psychiatry

2012 KI research grant 'Stress and cognitive aging'

2012 Lundbeck foundation research grant 'Stress and DNA methylation

2012 Poster award Society of Biological Psychiatry
‘Stressful life events and longitudinal telemore length decline’

2012 KI research grant 'Stress and telomere length'

2011 Individual Marie Curie fellowship  EU FP7 people program
'Stress, aging and the brain'

2008 Travel grant Alzheimer NL

2007 Travel grant Bright Conference EU