Hilleke Hulshoff Pol - Biography#

Hilleke Hulshoff Pol is full professor of neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where she leads the Brain Plasticity Group. In addition, she has a parttime assignment as professor in the field of neuroimaging and machine learning in psychiatric illness at the Department of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA. She is also affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry at University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on structural and functional brain plasticity throughout life in health and in psychiatric illness, and on the influences of genes and environment on brain plasticity. For this purpose, she studies healthy individuals and patients with psychiatric disorders and their (twin) family members, using magnetic resonance imaging at (ultra)-high field. More recently, she combines neuroimaging, and cognitive and behavioral measures, with genome-wide analyses. Moreover, to measure early brain development she also includes fetal ultrasound.

Locally, her research is embedded in one of the four focus areas of Utrecht University named Dynamics of Youth, as well as in the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center, and in the Complexity in Biology and Artificial Intelligence communities. Nationally, in the Netherlands, she is one of the PIs of a large Dutch Research Council gravity grant program entitled Growing Up Together in Society (from 01/2023 to 01/2033). She was also part of a former gravity grant program entitled Childhood Individual Development from 01/2012 to 11/2023). Internationally, at Mount Sinai, she uses machine learning approaches to neuroimaging in psychiatry. As part of the wordwide Enhancing Neuro-Imaging through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium, she has initiated the ENIGMA Brain Plasticity Working Group, which has recently discovered genes involved in structural brain changes throughout life (Brouwer et al, Nature Neuroscience 2022, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01042-4). The coming years, her plan is to continue focusing her research on brain plasticity, while taking new routes to discover how brain plasticity influences pre and postnatal development and aging to aid mental health outcome.

Her research has significant impact, both nationally and internationally. Nationally, in the Netherlands, this is evidenced by awards, such as the VIDI award, and recently by the Neuroscience in the Netherlands Leadership Award and Best Female Scientist Award, and by active participation in national research consortia, including in the Programs of Excellence and Gravity Programs (CID and GUTS), and Biobanking and Biomolecular Resource Research Infrastructure the Netherlands (BBMRI-NL) funded by the Dutch Research Council NWO (CID and GUTS). It is also evidenced by the book on Neuroimaging of the Brain for psychiatrists and psychologists, which is currently used for educational purposes. Internationally, her work has considerable impact, as is evidenced by the highly cited researcher distinction for exceptional research performance demonstrated by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field (Cross-Field) and year (2018, 2019, 2020) in Web of Science. Her work has influenced thinking about brain changes in health and psychiatric disease. While the brain is often thought to be completed after childhood, there is increasing evidence that the brain continues to change throughout life. Her work showed this process of brain changes in humans involves genes. Indeed, her work is well known for its twin-studies on the influences of genes and environment on brain structure and functions; for the recently discovered genes for brain changes; and for its focus on longitudinal brain changes throughout development and aging in health, and the associations with cognitive functioning such as intelligence, and in psychiatric disorders such as in schizophrenia.