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email: m.vaghi@bbk.ac.uk
web: Matilde's profile at Birkbeck
 

MATILDE VAGHI, Principal Investigator

Matilde is an MRC Career Development Fellow and Reader of Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her lab is interested in developing novel approaches to studying brain networks and cognitive processes implicated in psychiatric disorders on the compulsivity spectrum. A key goal is to understand the brain mechanisms underlying the emergence, maintenance, and remission of psychiatric symptoms and to move to personalisation of treatments for people affected by psychiatric conditions.

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Matilde gained her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Trevor Robbins and Ed Bullmore. Then, she was a postdoc at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging in London. Here, Matilde used publicly available datasets from the NeuroScience in Psychiatry Network and worked on understanding the developmental trajectory of cognitive processes and neural networks implicated in compulsivity with Ray Dolan. To create a tool apt for large-scale and longitudinal data collection and to engage the public in science, she also contributed to the development of a new smartphone app ‘The Happiness Project’ with Robb Rutledge. She was then awarded a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship and a Young Investigator NARSAD Award to continue her work at Stanford with Russ Poldrack.

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Maria Pitteri, Research Assistant

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Maria earned a BSc Medical Biosciences from Imperial College London. She completed double master’s degree in Brain and Mind Sciences, a joint programme between UCL, Ecole Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne. During her master’s, she worked under the supervision of Dr. Bastien Blain and she studied how human subjects process uncertainty in text and games. She seeks to understand the behavioral, computational and neural mechanisms underlying processing of uncertainty. She employs different methodologies including behavioural experiments and computational modelling. As a research assistant, Maria aims to further develop her skills by gaining hands-on experience with behavioural and neuroimaging experimental paradigms and techniques.

COLLABORATORS​

  • Prof. Carolyn Rodriguez, Stanford University

  • Dr. Patrick Bissett, Stanford University

  • Dr. Martin Nørgaard, Stanford University

  • Dr. Petra Vértes, University of Cambridge

  • Prof. Russ Poldrack (Post doc advisor), Stanford University

  • Dr. Robb Rutledge (Post doc advisor), Yale University

  • Prof. Trevor Robbins (PhD supervisor), University of Cambridge

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