Maria Teresa Ferretti, PhD, Privat Dozent, FEAN, is co-founder and Stakeholder engagement lead, Walking the Talk for Dementia Institute (WTD Institute), and she is also affiliated researcher, Center for Dementia Research, at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden.

Maria Teresa is a neuroscientist on a mission – to make sure that scientific innovation reaches the people who need it, in an equitable way. For this reason, she is a passionate scientific communicator (2xTED-x talks, 2 books for the general public), and an advocate for gender health equity and patient and public involvement in research.

Dementia first entered her life when she started her PhD (McGill University, Montreal), studying animal models of the disease. She then moved to Zurich, working with prof Roger Nitsch (the inventor of aducanumab). That’s when she realised the importance of sex and gender differences in Alzheimer, and she co-founded a non-profit organization (Women's Brain Project) to study them. 

In 2023 she joined the first WTD and fell in love with the idea. Since 2025 she is a co-founder of the WTD institute.

Currently, she leads the clinical development of Syntropic Medical, a startup creating neurostimulatory device for depression. In parallel, she is an affiliated researcher/Faculty/external teacher at various institutions including the Centre for Alzheimer’s Research at the Karolinska Institute, the University of Zurich, the Medical University of Vienna, and co-chair of the panel on Diversity Equity and Inclusion in Neurology of the European Academy of Neurology.