Maria Guidi obtained her MSc degree in Physics from the Faculty of Physics and Life Sciences at Copenhagen University in 2013 with a thesis entitled “Scale selection in fracture patterns: A case study in columnar joints”.
Then she moved to Leipzig, Germany, where she pursued her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Harald E. Möller and Dr. Laurentius Huber at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Physiological modulators of the BOLD response in the human primary motor cortex”, focused on methods for high-resolution imaging of the functional response using a state-of-the-art Siemens Magnetom 7T MR scanner. An important outcome of this work was the extraction of a layer-dependent profile of changes in cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption (CMRO2) during a finger-tapping task, for which she was awarded a Summa cum Laude merit award from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 2015.
Currently, she is exploring the use of calibrated BOLD combined with high-resolution VASO on a Siemens Prisma 3T for the study of brain physiology in healthy aging.