Centre for Human Brain Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham
Dr. Matthew Apps, Principal Investigator
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 becoming a BBSRC Future Leader Fellow. He is now a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow and Senior Research Fellow (=Associate Professor) in the Centre for Human Brain Health, Institute for Mental Health and School of Psychology in the University of Birmingham.
Dr. Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta, Postdoctoral Fellow
Sebastian completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr. Matt Apps, Dr. Molly Crockett and Dr. Geoff Bird. He also holds an MSc in Neuroscience from University of Queensland, Australia, and a BSc in Psychology from Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile. His research focuses on understanding the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie prosocial behaviour - what environmental and internal factors affect an agent's decision to incur costs to help others, using methods such as neuroimaging and computational modelling.
Dr. Andrea Pisauro, Postdoctoral Fellow
Andrea is a Postdoctoral Researcher. He completed a PhD at UCL in the laboratory of Matteo Carandini. He then moved to Glasgow to work on simultaneous EEG-fMRI in the laboratory of Marios Philiastides. He is interested in the neural basis and the computational principles underlying human decision making. His current work involves understanding the role of social context in shaping behavior and how it is encoded by the brain to inform valuation and decision making.
Cody Kommers, PhD student
Cody is a PhD student in Experimental Psychology at Oxford, where he is supervised by Matthew Apps and Geoff Bird. Before coming to Oxford, Cody studied cognitive science at UCLA and Harvard. Most of the questions he is interested in revolve around how people think about other people, especially when those other people are different from oneself.
Emma Scholey, PhD student
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
Katia is a PhD student funded by the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership (MIBTP) and supervised by Dr Matt Apps and Prof 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.
Max Laverty, MSc student
Max is an MSc student at the University of Birmingham, studying Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience. He completed his undergraduate in Biology at the University of Sheffield with a year spent at McMaster University, Canada. Main interests include decision neuroscience especially in relation to prosociality and the neuropsychology of social influence. Current work at the MSN lab involves investigating the neural mechanisms of non-binary decision making in foraging systems.
Alumni
Anthony Gabay (former postdoc, now data scientist ad 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)