Centre for Human Brain Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham
Prof. Matthew Apps
Principal Investigator ​
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Matt is the Principal Investigator of the MSN lab. Having completed a PhD and postdoc at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the University Oxford first as a postdoc, then became a BBSRC Future Leader Fellow, BBSRC David Phillips Fellow and Senior Research Fellow. He is now a Professor of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at the Centre for Human Brain Health, Institute for Mental Health and School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham.
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Dr Selma Lugtmeijer
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Selma completed a PhD in the Netherlands at the University of Amsterdam and the Donders Institute Nijmegen on memory deficits in stroke patients. She moved to St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada for a postdoc at Brock University, where she studied working memory and event segmentation in aging. Currently, Selma is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the MSN lab. Her research at the Centre for Human Brain Health focuses on fMRI signals that underlie motivation to exert effort. She is also involved in the Open Science Special Interest Group for the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping conference.
Dr Meijia Li
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Meijia completed her PhD in Belgium at Vrije Universiteit Brussel under the supervision of Frank Van Overwalle. Her doctoral research focused on the role of the cerebellum in understanding sequences of social interactions. Before that, she attained her MSc degree in psychology from Beijing Normal University, where she studied cognitive ageing and decision-making processes. Currently, Meijia serves as a postdoctoral fellow at the MSN lab. Her research at the Centre for Human Brain Health explores the intricate mechanisms of human motivation and apathy, employing a computational modelling approach. Beyond her academic pursuits, Meijia enjoys cooking and cycling.
Dr Hikaru Sugimoto
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Hikaru is a postdoctoral fellow at the CHBH and RIKEN, funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He completed his PhD at Kyoto University, where he explored the neural basis of social episodic memory. Following his PhD, he joined the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project as a Postdoctoral Researcher, focusing on the neural underpinnings of social abilities and traits in older adults and engaging in cognitive intervention research. Currently, his interests lie in computational modelling, with his research at the MSN lab centered on the neural mechanisms underlying social motivation and decision-making modulated in diverse contexts.
Emma Scholey
PhD student
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Emma is a PhD Student in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, supervised by Matthew Apps, Mark Humphries and Ned Jenkinson. She is currently spending six months at the University of Nottingham in the Humphries lab learning computational models of the dopamine system. She is investigating how dysfunction in the dopamine system underlies motivation impairments such as seen in Parkinson’s Disease. Before joining the MSN lab, Emma completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of Surrey and worked as a statistician in the civil service. Outside of the lab she enjoys reading anything/everything and rock climbing.
Katarzyna Dudzikowska
PhD student
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Katia is a PhD student funded by the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership (MIBTP) and supervised by Matthew Apps and Ole Jensen.
Before joining the lab she completed a BSc in Psychology at The Open University, an MSc at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain in Germany, and worked in mental health and brain injury rehabilitation. Katia is interested in the role that metacognition – awareness and monitoring of one's own cognition – plays in motivation and fatigue and whether this relationship can help us understand motivation and fatigue-related impairments in disorders of mental health.
Dr Jamie Talbot
PhD student
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Jamie received his primary medical degree (MBChB) from the University of Bristol in 2011 and has worked in the NHS for over 10 years. Currently a specialist registrar in neurology (ST6) in the South West Peninsula region, he has gained extensive experience working with patients with common neurological conditions such as stroke, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and dementia. He is now working towards a PhD based at the University of Birmingham as part of the Midlands Mental Health and Neuroscience doctoral training program, supervised by Matthew Apps and Matthew Broome. The PhD plans to investigate apathy in the context of different clinical disorders, addressing it as a multi-dimensional construct using a mix of research methodologies.
Zhilin Su
PhD student
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Zhilin is a third-year PhD student in Psychology funded by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan. He is supervised by Prof. Patricia Lockwood, Prof. Matthew Apps and Dr Todd Vogel at the University of Birmingham. He holds an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience and a BSc in Psychology from National Taiwan University. Zhilin is intrigued by the behavioural, computational and neural mechanisms underlying social learning and group decision-making in health, disease, and development. He is investigating collective timing decisions in group foraging using behavioural experiments and computational modelling. Outside of the lab, he enjoys doing gymnastics, playing volleyball, and eating chocolate chip cookies.
Nikita Mehta
PhD student
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Nikita holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Mumbai, India. She later worked as a Junior Research Assistant at Monk Prayogshala, a non-profit institute in Mumbai. After moving to the UK, she completed her MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, followed by a year as a Research Assistant at the MSN Lab in the University of Birmingham. She is particularly interested in exploring decision-making processes through computational and neural mechanisms, with a focus on climate change and misinformation.
Kubra Karatas
Research Associate
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Kübra is a research associate supervised by Matthew Apps and Lei Zhang. She completed a BSc in Psychology and Biology at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and holds an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Trento in Italy. For her thesis, she conducted a behavioural study to investigate the possible presence of emotion processing deficits in mild cognitive impairment patients. She is especially interested in the neural mechanisms of social cognition and decision-making processes in health and neurodegeneration using computational models.
Charley Roberts
Research Assistant
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Charley completed her MSc in Applied Neuroscience and BSc in Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also worked as a Research Assistant on a project investigating eye and head movements involved in visual search using virtual reality. Her MSc project used fMRI to study the theory of mind network while judging visual humor. In her spare time, Charley enjoys playing the guitar and spending time with animals.
Alumni
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Dr Andrea Pisauro (former Postdoctoral Fellow, now Lecturer at the University of Plymouth)
Dr Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta (former Postdoctoral Fellow, now Assistant Professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez)
Cody Kommers (former PhD student)
Max Laverty (former MSc Student)
Anthony Gabay (former postdoc, now data scientist at IXICO)
Campbell Le Heron (former PhD student, now researcher New Zealand Brain Research Institute, Christchurch)
​Tanja Muller (former PhD student, now PostDoc Fellow at University of Zurich)
Katie O'Nell (former MPhil student, now PhD student at Dartmouth College)
Mindagaus Jurgelis (former MSc student, now PhD student at Monash University, Australia)
Lore Vleugels (former MSc student, now PhD student at UC Louvain, Brussels)
Daniele Pollicino (former MSc student, now PhD student at London School of Economics)
Arno Gekiere (former MSc student, now data engineer at Massive Media. Brussels)
Svenja Küchenhoff (former MSc student, now MSc student at University of Oxford)
Alice Floris (former MSc student)
Lucy Fisher (former BSc student)