Specialization
Wilma van de Berg is senior translational and cellular neuroscientist, principal investigator and associate professor at dept. Anatomy and Neurosciences, head of the research section Clinical Neuroanatomy and Biobanking (CNAB), member of executive board of Advanced Optical Microscopy Core (www.ao2m.amsterdam) and lecturer in clinical neuroanatomy, neuropathology of movement disorders and clinical and translational neurosciences, Amsterdam UMC. She is an expert in human neuroanatomy, morphometry and 3D imaging (quantitaive MRI-to-pathology), and structural and cellular biology. She is founder and director of the Normal Aging Brain Bank (www.nabca.eu), which collects advanced postmortem MRI and high-quality brain tissue of non-demented elderly for stimulating translational research in neurosciences.
Focus of research
Her research over the years has focused on unravelling cellular mechanisms underpinning selective vulnerability, protein aggregation, clinical heterogeneity and disease progression in Parkinson’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders. The knowledge on neuroanatomy, neuropathology, cellular disease mechanisms and human brain morphology in aging and disease is utilized to define novel MRI and biofluid biomarkers for improving early diagnosis and prediction of cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease. She has gained experience in conducting clinical studies (e.g. PROGRESS-PD) in which Parkinson patients and age-matched controls were followed for eight years and identification of biofluid markers for disease progression in PD. She currently co-leads the longitudinal cohort ‘Profiling Parkinson’s’(ProPARK) and works closely together with clinical and industrie partners to identify molecular subtypes in Parkinson's disease. She is also partner in a large EU consortium, named NEUROCOV, which aims to unravel wich cell types are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection and how damage occurs and what makes individualss vulnerable or resistant to such complications.