Mariana Carneiro de Andrade is a PhD candidate at the EPAN lab since March 2023, supervised by Prof. Karin Roelofs, Prof. Ivan Toni, and dr. Mirjam Kampman. Her project focuses on tackling threat avoidance, and especially how to learn emotional action control under threat.
In her primary project, SpeakUp!2.0 (done in collaboration with Propersona), she is investigating whether exposure for fear of public speaking in individuals with social anxiety disorder can be enhanced using a transcranial alternating current stimulation protocol previously developed in the lab.
In this large project, she is also interested in (1) the neural endophenotypic variability of participants, which she measures combining MRS and DTI methods, and in (2) characterizing avoidance behaviour in a naturalistic setting using multimodal methods which include eye tracking, audio (prosody) and video (motion tracking) recordings, posturography, and physiology.
Furthermore, Mariana in interested in the computational modelling of learning in probabilistic reversal learning tasks to capture adaptive learning in volatile or stable environments. She is investigating this using a task under threat of shock to understand the role of freezing in this process, and using fMRI methods to study the underlying neural mechanisms.
Mariana started her academic studies with a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from Maastricht University. After realizing that the brain was the part of the body that fascinated her the most, she decided to start a Research Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience in Radboud University. As part of her internship, she had the chance of joining the EPAN lab under the supervision of dr. James Livermore, where she worked on the above-mentioned fMRI project that investigated the influence of freezing on learning. During her studies she was also a student assistant in the DUST project, where she helped collect a dataset in a student population. After her graduation, she worked in the lab as a Research Assistant for the DUST project as well as for the longitudinal PIA project under the supervision of dr. Floris Klumpers, where she collected the last follow-up wave of questionnaire data in police officers.