Lea J. Mertens received her M.Sc. in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience with a specialization in Neuropsychology from Maastricht University. During her thesis internship at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College London she i) was coordinator of the Global Psychedelic Survey (global.psychedelicsurvey.com) and ii) wrote her Master’s thesis about functional connectivity changes after treatment with psilocybin in patients with treatment-resistant major depression, supervised by Dr. R. Carhart-Harris and Dr. M. Wall.
For her PhD she has joined the recently established Department of Molecular Neuroimaging, headed by Prof. Gerhard Gründer, at the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) in Mannheim. Her main research interests lie in the therapeutic potential as well as biological and psychological mechanisms of psychoactive substances, with a particular focus on psychedelic drugs.