Members

Principal Investigator

Jacob Vogel

Principal Investigator

Jake is the head of the DeMON Lab and the director of the Neurodegenerative Research Unit at the Department of Clinical Science Malmö at Lund University. As a SciLifeLab and Wallenberg National Program Data-driven Life Sciences (DDLS) fellow, Jake is a proud member of SciLifeLab, and is also a member of Multi-Park Lund. Jake trained at UC-Berkeley, got his PhD at McGill University, and did a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming an expert along the way in neuroimaging, aging, AI and bioinformatics. He now dedicates his time toward better understanding how neurodegenerative diseases work, and building innovative tools to improve clinical care.

Postdocs

Yu Xiao

Postdoctoral researcher

XIAO Yu joined the lab in November 2023 as a postdoctoral researcher after earning her Ph.D. at Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore. Trained as a neuroimager, her research broadly centers on uncovering the mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias through computational modeling. Her work focuses on developing and adapting disease progression models to better understand pathological spread and atrophy accumulation in these disorders.

Lijun An

Postdoctoral researcher

Lijun grew up in China and earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National University of Singapore. He later joined Lund University, where he is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the DeMON Lab..

Léa Chauveau

Postdoctoral researcher

I joined the DeMON Lab in 2025 as a postdoc researcher, after completing a PhD in the Neuropresage Team (Caen, France). My scientific curiosity has long revolved around the hippocampus and its resilience mechanisms, which led me to explore medial temporal lobe alterations in aging and Alzheimer’s disease through neuroimaging — falling for fMRI along the way.

Hannah Baumeister

Postdoctoral researcher

Hannah joined the lab in 2026 while wrapping up her PhD in clinical neuroscience at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Magdeburg, Germany. During her MSc in psychology, she discovered her passion for neurodegenerative diseases and went on to focus her PhD on developing MRI-based tools to improve our understanding of these diseases and the clinical management of patients. In the DeMON lab, she will utilise large-scale multimodal neuroimaging datasets to investigate the mechanisms driving heterogeneity in Alzheimer’s disease. Outside the lab, Hannah is an avid road cyclist, a mediocre knitter, and considers hunting down cute cafes her unofficial part-time job.

Graduate Students

Jonathan Rittmo

Jonathan is a PhD student studying how brain connectivity changes across aging and Alzheimer’s disease. With a background in statistics and cognitive science, his work focuses on large-scale neuroimaging datasets to better understand how functional brain networks reorganize in the face of pathology.

Gabriele Vilkaite

Gabriele joined the lab in 2023 September after graduating with a degree in Molecular Cell Biology. With a background in wet-lab biology, she now applies single-cell transcriptomics and computational approaches to study cellular and molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease.
In her free time, Gabriele enjoys sailing, both recreationally and competitively, having sailed all over Europe and with dreams to one day make a journey across the Atlantic.

Narjes Goshtasbi

I am a PhD student joining the DeMon Lab in 2026, with a background in biomedical engineering and machine learning. My research focuses on applying statistical and computational methods to neuroimaging data to study the heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s disease. My work is grounded in data-driven approaches in neuroscience, motivated by an interest in leveraging engineering methodologies to investigate complex brain-related conditions.

Mirjam Müller

I started my PhD in 2023 and joined the lab halfway through, bringing a background in mathematics and bioinformatics. My research focuses on subtyping neurodegenerative diseases using both omics data and image analysis, with the goal of better understanding their underlying complexity.

Research Assistants

Zoe Ruoyi Zhao

Research Assistant

Ruoyi graduated with a Master’s degree in Machine Learning from Lund University in September 2024 and joined the lab immediately after. She is currently focusing on developing deep learning methods for the automated segmentation of medial temporal lobe (MTL) subregions in histological data to advance the understanding of neurodegenerative pathology. Driven by academic curiosity, she is interested in exploring how AI models can reveal the hidden structural patterns in either images or clinical data that may provide new insights into the progression of neurodegenerative disease.

Gabriele De Leonardis

Research Assistant

Gabriele joined the lab in October 2024 as a research assistant after getting a master’s degree from the University of Trento, Italy. His work focuses primarily on curating and processing multimodal MRI images from the ROSMAP dataset, a great resource for research on aging and neurodegenerative disease. He is particularly interested in brain connectivity, both structural and functional, and how network-based approaches can help unravel complex mechanisms underlying cognition and pathology.

Romina Zendehdel

Research Assistant

Romina joined the lab in 2024 as a master’s student in Molecular Medicine, completing her degree project. With a background in Molecular Biology, she focused on proteomics data and bioinformatics approaches to study how organ aging may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. Her research combined molecular insights with computational methods to better understand systemic factors influencing brain health.

Bachelor / Master Students

Nadine Li Pigida
Project
Master in Bioinformatics

Ruizhen Shen
Master Thesis
Machine Learning, Systems and Control

Yaqi Jiao
Project
Master in Bioinformatics

Elsa Gustafsson
Internship
Master in Biomedical Engineering

Catarina Barreiros
Thesis
Bachelor in Biomedicine

Emma Volcov
Thesis
Bachelor in Biomedicine

Alumni

Malo Gicquel, Master student (2023)
Alma Lennartsson, Master student (2025-2026)