Dr. Hilfiker received her MS from the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1992 and her PhD in molecular neuroscience from the Rockefeller University, New York in 1998. She studied under the supervision of Paul Greengard, Nobel Laureate 2000 in Medicine or Physiology. Following a short postdoctoral appointment at the Rockefeller University, Dr. Hilfiker was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellowship to join the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester, UK in 2000. Dr. Hilfiker obtained a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship in 2003, and was apppointed Principal Investigator in 2008 in the CSIC in Spain. She is recipient of the first Research Prize of the Spanish Federation for Parkinson´s Disease (2008). Since 2019, she has served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at New Jersey Medical School, Rutgers University, New Jersey.