Carina Oehrn is a cognitive neuroscientist and physician. Her research focuses on the neural basis of non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD), the second most common neurodegenerative disorder worldwide. Carina's expertise lies in intracranial human recordings and deep brain stimulation (DBS). She employs these advanced techniques to investigate basal ganglia-cortical neural networks during cognitive and affective processing in PD patients. 

She received her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience from the University of Cologne, Germany, and her master’s degree in Brain and Mind Sciences from University College London and the École normale supérieure in Paris. Carina completed her medical studies and PhD at the University of Cologne and Bonn, Germany, where her research focused on prefrontal-hippocampal interactions during executive functions. Throughout this time, she undertook research stays at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the University of Sydney, as well as clinical volunteering in Shanghai, China, and The Gambia. 

She then received funding for her own research group in Marburg, Germany, to investigate the neural signature of DBS effects on cognitive processing in Parkinson’s disease. In 2021, she received the Parkinson Fellowship of the Thiemann Foundation to join Philip Starr at the University of California, San Francisco, as a visiting scholar, where she focused on developing algorithms for adaptive deep brain stimulation. At UC Davis, Carina studies the neural signatures of cognitive and emotional processing in Parkinson’s disease in real-life environments and develops adaptive DBS therapies for these symptoms.