About Olga

Olga Klimecki is a neuroscientist and psychologist. She is currently interim chair of Social Psychology at the Universität der Bundeswehr, Hamburg, Germany. She holds a PhD (Dr. phil., summa cum laude) from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and a Dr. rer. nat. habil. from Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, where she was guest professor in Psychology in 2020 and 2021.

Her research focuses on the promotion of mental and physical health across the lifespan. Olga and her team use randomised controlled studies to test the causal impact of behavioural, cognitive, and emotional interventions. Olga’s research also studies bio-psycho-social mechanisms of action with a focus on brain functions and connectivity, emotions, as well as interpersonal and intergroup behaviour.

She has (co-)authored over 80 publications, has received several grants and awards, and is co-principal investigator of the longest meditation study to date – the Medit-Ageing / Silver Santé study. In addition, she has been leading research on conflict resolution in different countries since 2013. Olga is also practicing mindfulness meditation. Currently, she is particularly curious about embodied and moving mindfulness practices that can be done alone or in groups.

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Key Findings

During her PhD, Olga provided the first evidence for (differential) functional brain plasticity after emotional training in adults (e.g., Cerebral Cortex, 2013; SCAN, 2014; Current Biology, 2014).

In the SCD-Well clinical trial of the Medit-Ageing project conducted in four European countries, Olga and her colleagues showed that two months of meditation or health self-management training lead to a lasting reduction in anxiety (an important risk factor for dementia) in older participants with subjective cognitive decline (Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 2021).

In 2023, using an innovative task-rest paradigm, Olga and her team provided evidence that functional brain connectivity between the default mode network and the amygdala is related to negative emotions, rumination, and anxiety in resting states following social and emotional stimuli in older adults (Nature Aging). The team is currently continuing this work by testing the influence of emotion regulation and 18-month interventions on the activity and connectivity of this network.

Key findings from Olga’s lab in the domain of conflict resolution prove the causal effects of sleep deprivation on increased cortisol responses to conflicts and lower positive emotions in conflicts in romantic couples (Affective Science, 2022). In addition, their findings show the causal positive effects of mediation on conflict resolution and related brain functions (Cortex, 2020), as well as the causal impact of compassion meditation on improving difficult relations (Scientific Reports, 2023).

Since 2022, Olga has been working closely with Dr. Miranka Wirth, head of the Brain Resilience lab at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Dresden. Together, their teams are investigating translational models of the influence of risk factors (such as stress and cortisol) and protective factors (such as environmental enrichment, e.g. through music, art, or the acquisition of new languages) on the health of older people in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

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