Franziska Plessow

Franziska Plessow is a Research Fellow at the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital. Her primary academic role is within the Neuroendocrine Unit under Harvard Medical School. Previously, she held a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Dresden University of Technology (since 2012) and a Visiting Postdoctoral position at Duke University and Queens College, CUNY (2012). She earned her Dr. rer. nat. (Ph.D.) in Psychology from TU Dresden (2011) and a Diploma in Psychology from Humboldt University Berlin (2007).

Her research focuses on cognitive control under biopsychological stressors like acute/chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and circadian misalignment. She investigates psychoneuroendocrine and immunological influences on prefrontal cortex functions and stress/emotion regulation. Key themes include how stress impairs goal-directed behavior, dual-task performance, and cognitive flexibility.

Notable awards include the Werner Straub Dissertation Award (2012) and multiple fellowships from the German National Academic Foundation. Her work bridges clinical translational science and basic neuroscience, with implications for understanding stress-related cognitive deficits in real-world scenarios.

Her research also examines the neuroendocrine basis of cognitive performance in sleep-deprived populations, such as new parents. Current affiliations combine clinical translational research at Harvard with ongoing collaborations in cognitive neuroscience across institutions.