Anastasia Illarionova is pursuing her Ph.D in the German Center of Neurodegenerative Diseases in Tübingen under the supervision of Prof. Peter Heutink. She is interested in the identification of genetic risk factors for neurological disorders, with a focus on detection and annotation of pathogenic coding and non-coding structural variants causal for sporadic cases of Parkinson’s disease. She received her Master’s degree from the Graduate Training Center of Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, where she worked on the investigation of protein-protein interaction and gene co-expression networks for a disease module detection.