Speakers

Milo Imbeni - Unraveling pathology in neuroinflammatory diseases through advanced microscopy and high field MRI.

Light sheet microscopy and high field MRI have shown great promise to investigate brain structure from the micro to the mesoscale. In this project, we plan to implement state of the art clearing and staining methods to then integrate imaging modalities and study pathological changes due to neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases, both in mouse model and human postmortem tissue. A first step will be to optimize antibodies and small-molecule dyes to tag elements of synapses in Alzheimer's mice, such as glial and neuronal cells, and neuromuscular junctions in myasthenia gravis. Afterwards, large scale data processing pipelines will be implemented to analyze terabyte scale data produced by light sheet microscopy, and to align it to 9.4 T MRI structural scans.

 

Marillien Marzolla - Understanding sensory processing sensitivity from an integrated psychological, economic and health science perspective.

Sensory processing refers to our ability to integrate relevant sensory information and respond appropriately. Individuals vary in sensitivity to this incoming information, with 10-15% of the general population being described as sensory hypersensitive. Following an acquired brain injury, individuals may develop sensory hypersensitivity, leading to challenges in daily functioning and impacting mental and physical well-being. The ongoing project seeks to uncover the currently unidentified mechanisms that underlie sensory hypersensitivity and aims to pinpoint contributing factors from a psychological, economic and health science perspective.

 

James Wilkinson - Levelling the playing field: Empowering fatigued brains in economic decision making.

This project aims to develop a behavioral decision-making task for assessing patience and motivation while identifying fMRI activation associated with individual differences whilst making these decisions. Additionally, we seek to understand how these decisions change, behaviourally and in the brain, when individuals experience fatigue. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of a real-time fMRI neurofeedback intervention designed to enhance decision-making abilities in fatigued individuals.

 

Charlotte Kroll - Dissecting the pro-social effects of oxytocin (Oxy-Pro)

The neuropeptide oxytocin is thought to play a role in the regulation of social-emotional behaviors and cognition. Human research in this field has been greatly facilitated by synthetic, intranasal oxytocin that poses a non-invasive examination method. Here, a seminal paper by Kosfeld and colleagues (2005) reported that intranasally administered oxytocin (compared to a placebo) increased pro-social behavior in humans. While on the one hand we aim to replicate this finding in a large-scale, pre-registered format to contribute to a more refined understanding of oxytocin’s involvement in human social behavior, we are also interested in heterogeneity in study populations in oxytocin research more generally to establish comprehensive explanations of potential causal mechanisms. Here, we are interested in subpopulations exhibiting psychological traits that may be especially sensitive to oxytocin administration, and in a potential relationship between oxytocin, social-emotional behavior, and sex hormones.