Laura’s interest and expertise lie in the field of behavioural genetics, mental health and musical engagement. Her work addresses factors that influence mental health and musical expertise as well as the relationship between the two, with a focus on gene-environment interplay. She obtained her PhD in 2018 at the Biological Psychology Department of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where she studied genetic and familial factors that influence the development and persistence of childhood psychopathology. After obtaining her PhD, she continued research in the field of behavioural genetics as a postdoc at the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Instititute in Stockholm, where she studied gene-environmental interplay underlying musical expertise. Nowadays, she works at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt at the Behavioural Genetics unit in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam UMC, where she is located and able to work closely together with the psychiatric genetics lab lead by Prof. Karin Verweij.