National Institutes of Health

Post-Doc, NIMH Laboratory of Neuropsychology

irta

About

I am a post doc at NIH working with Bruno Averbeck at the NIMH Laboratory of Neuropsychology. At NIH I lead experiments using behavioral psychophysics and human brain imaging using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). I also dabble in statistical analysis innovation and modeling.

I am interested in the fundamental brain mechanisms that give rise to the everyday experiences that are important to us, such as our social interactions. How is it some cells in your head can give you thoughts, feeling and perceptions? And can we "crack the code" your brain uses when transmitting information about you and the world in which you live? Most of my work to date has focused on neural representations of the most important social cue for humans: the face. I have also studied musical stimuli and decision making.

I studied Psychology at UIUC and Neuroscience at UTD, where I learned SPECT and undertook fMRI and behavioral studies investigating how social judgments influence neural representations and memories of facial identities. In London, I worked as a postdoc with Ray Dolan at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (the FIL) for three years where I used fMRI and MEG to investigate how experience influences neural representation and perception of facial identities and expressions. I continued this collaboration while affiliated with University College London Computer Science for 1.5 years. Here I worked with John Shawe-Taylor and Tim Griffiths using MEG to study predictive coding mechanisms in musical sound sequences. Also while in London I undertook with Brad Duchaine and Lucia Garrido (at ICN) a large-scale study of developmental prosopagnosics (individuals who developed deficient facial identity perception), measuring structural MRI, fMRI, diffusion tensor imaging and extensive behavioral tests.

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