Dr. Scholz earned her medical doctorate from the Medical University Innsbruck, Austria, in 2004. After graduation she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Aging (USA). Dr. Scholz expects to complete her PhD at the Department of Molecular Neuroscience at the University College, London (United Kingdom) in 2010. Her research focuses primarily on the genetics of neuro-degenerative disease, with particular emphasis on parkinsonism and related disorders. In her PhD thesis, she described the application of modern, high-throughput genotyping methodologies for the detection of disease-associated genetic risk factors. In 2009, she joined the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University to apply modern neurogenomics techniques to the search for peripheral biomarkers of neuro-degenerative diseases.