Zwaag Lab
The research group of Wietske van der Zwaag at the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging in Amsterdam, working at the boundary between MR development and neuroscience.
Welcome to my website! I joined the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging in 2015. In 2019, I formed my own group here, working at the boundary between MR-development and neuroscience. Previously, I worked with 7T-MRI at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. I did my PhD at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre (SPMIC) in Nottingham in the United Kingdom under supervision of Richard Bowtell and Sue Francis.
Our research is centred on best harnessing the strong points of 7T in neuroimaging. I am especially interested in functional MRI of finely organized brain structures, such as the human cerebellum. The use of ultra-high field scanners (7T) allows the study of the human brain at unprecedented resolution and is ideal for studying this intricately structured brain region. In our work, we look for solutions for the technical problems that also form a part of scanning at 7T, to best profit from the technical advantages offered by 7T MRI.
For more details, please see the Research page. If you have any questions, you can e-mail me at .
Learn more about our lab’s work:
- Research, in four lines:
- Ultra-high field MRI: better signal detection and sequences such as MP2RAGE and MP2RAGEME.
- Functional MRI: 3D-EPI for the whole brain, line scanning, and contrasts such as VASO and ABC.
- Maps in the brain: body maps, and maps of numbers and time.
- Cerebellum: imaging the thin, highly folded cortex of the “little brain” at 7T.
- Group: the current team, photos, and alumni by year.
- Publications: a few recent and important papers, and all papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Scopus.
- Awards: grants and prizes, from 2014 to now.
- Contact: postal address, phone and e-mail.
Recent highlights
- 2026 Wietske received a Vici grant from NWO-TTW: “Mesoscale MRI: a window on the functional subunits of the human cerebellum”.
- 2024 At the ISMRM in Singapore, Thijs de Buck received 1st prize and Mitra Tavakkoli 2nd prize at the High Field Study Group poster competition, both in the application category.
- 2024 Wietske was invited to join the Annual Meeting Program Committee of the ISMRM and the editorial board of the new journal Imaging Neuroscience.
- 2023 Our Radiology paper “High-Resolution Motion-corrected 7.0-T MRI to Derive Morphologic Measures from the Human Cerebellum in Vivo” was highlighted with an editorial.