I am a doctoral student at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, working under the supervision of Dr Quentin Huys and Prof Raymond Dolan. I am interested in using computational modelling to develop novel tools for predicting individual phenotypic features from behavioural data and imaging data. My PhD work focuses on gaining a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying depression and anxiety using dynamical modelling of mood/symptoms and theory-driven cognitive approaches.

Methods for Dummies (MfD) is a course taught by its participants, and aims to give a basic introduction to human brain imaging analysis methods, focusing on fMRI and M/EEG. The course is open to anyone who is willing to commit to giving at least one of the lectures of the course. Don't worry if you don't know much yet, you'll get help preparing your lecture!

I joined the Translation Neuromodeling Unit (TNU) in Zurich for my Master’s thesis. The aim of the study was to identify working memory related brain activity in healthy subjects using fMRI. A newly developed WM paradigm was used, which enabled to maintain the performance equally across subjects and between conditions. Further on, effective connectivity was investigated by applying dynamic causal modelling (DCM). During my time at the TNU, besides sparking my curiosity for computational modelling in psychiatry, I acquired fMRI data, learnt to analyse fMRI data using SPM and to model the data using DCM.

From November 2015 to December 2016, I was part of PD Dr. Müller-Pfeiffer’s study group in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital Zurich. During this one-year internship, my main task was to perform screenings and test-examinations for a study investigating blocking of memory reconsolidation by EMDR. In a second project, we conducted a meta-analysis about functional impairment in PTSD. Other tasks included performing attention tests and the Hogrefe test, as well as magnetic resonance images, with PTSD patients and trauma-control subjects as a follow-up of a study conducted by PD Dr. Müller-Pfeiffer.