I am a postdoctoral researcher in the EPAN lab based in the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging.
My journey into academia began with a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Philipps-University of Marburg, where I developed an early interest in interdisciplinary work. I continued with a Master’s degree in Brain and Behavioral Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I gained valuable insights into computational, psychophysiological, and clinical research.
During my Ph.D. studies, I developed a passion for affective neuroscience and investigated the formation and consolidation of extinction memories in both humans and rodents. I conducted this research under the guidance of Prof. Raffael Kalisch at the Neuroimaging Center in Mainz, where we explored the boundary conditions of the facilitatory effect of L-DOPA on extinction memory consolidation. Additionally, I had the privilege of working with Prof. Albrecht Stroh at the Translational Animal Research Center, where I developed a combined behavior and fMRI pipeline for rodent extinction learning during fMRI acquisition.
Currently, as a member of the EPAN lab, I am contributing to research that aims to investigate the role of cortico-spinal networks in defensive responses to threat. More specifically, upon threat encounter, the body and brain must have well-coordinated information relay and integration for appropriate assessment and reaction, which is facilitated by the spinal cord. We seek to gain a better understanding of changes in connectivity between the spinal cord and sensory and motor brain areas during threat anticipation. Additionally, we aim to explore whether individual physiological responses during threat anticipatory freezing at conditioning are related to extinction learning success and changes in cortico-spinal connectivity.