With a Bachelor's in Psychology, specialising in Medical Psychology, and a Master's in Fundamental Neuroscience from Maastricht University, Lisa started her PhD in September 2023. Her project is a collaboration between the Department of Pathology at GROW (Supervisor Veerle Melotte) and MERLN. It aims to understand how the nervous system shapes colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide, with close to two million new diagnoses each year.

Tumours are often described as wounds that never heal. Nerves play an active role in normal wound repair, and in colorectal cancer they end up embedded in the tumour microenvironment. Their role in the tumour microenvironment is laregley unknown in colorectal cancer. In her PhD project, she combines MALDI mass spectrometry imaging, laser capture microdissection-based proteomics and spatial transcriptomics to map how lipids, proteins and gene expression shift in human and mouse tissue. Her goal is to investigate whether nerves nerves are simply present in the tumour or actively help drive its growth.