Laura’s fascination with the brain began as an undergraduate studying psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she was introduced to the field of cognitive neuroscience and human brain imaging. This, paired with her interests in sex differences and women’s health, led her to Dr. Emily Jacobs’ lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the course of her PhD, she designed and led precision imaging studies linking sex steroid hormones to human brain structure and function. Now as a postdoc supported by a National Institutes of Health K00, Laura works to apply advanced computational methods to multi-modal brain imaging data to comprehensively map the brain’s response to critical endocrine transition periods (e.g., puberty, pregnancy, menopause) over the lifespan. Her ultimate pursuit is to establish endocrine drivers of vulnerability for neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases that disproportionately burden women.