I am interested in how loneliness, social isolation and stress affect the brain and mind, especially during adolescent development. I mainly use neuroimaging in combination with multi-voxel pattern analysis methods (MVPA and RSA) to address my research questions.
My PhD research at the Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit at University of Vienna (supervised by Claus Lamm) focused on the effects of acute stress on neural correlates of empathy. I then completed 3 years of postdoctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT (working with Rebecca Saxe) investigating how deprivation of social needs affects the human brain. From 2020-2024, I was a Henslow Research Fellow at Hughes Hall at University of Cambridge (working with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore).
Since March 2024 I am an Assistant Professor at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC). If you are interested in working with me, please send me an email outlining your research interests.