Valentina is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Her clinical background and expertise in advanced neuroimaging and AI-based quantitative pathology inform her long-term research goal: to understand the mechanisms that link cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) and Alzheimer’s disease to identify targets for therapeutic interventions. Whilst attending medical school and during her residency in Neurology in Germany, she worked under the supervision of Profs. Emrah Düzel and Stefanie Schreiber at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE). She led projects based on high-resolution 7T MRI, linking hippocampal arteries to cognitive reserve. During her postdoctoral fellowship at MGH, under the supervision of Dr. Susanne van Veluw, she combined in vivo MRI, ultra-high-resolution ex vivo MRI, and histopathology to investigate the neuropathological correlates of MRI-defined vascular lesions. She was awarded the Walter Benjamin fellowship from the German Research Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship and is the recipient of a K99/R00 pathway of independence award.