People

Dr. Yaniv Abir – Postdoctoral Researcher

Yaniv completed his PhD at Columbia University with Daphna Shohamy and Mike Shadlen, studying how humans explore their environment and what drives their curiosity for various types of information. Broadly, Yaniv is interested in how humans plan their future actions in the service of their goals, and how such planning strategies change with states of mental health.

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Dr. Isabel Berwian – Affiliate Researcher

Isabel is a postdoctoral researcher with Yael Niv at Princeton University and an affiliated researcher with the Applied Computational Psychiatry Lab. Her goal is to develop computational tools to examine mechanisms of change in psychotherapy and subsequently use these tools to identify predictors of treatment response to specific psychotherapy interventions. To this end, she is building generative computational models and behavioural tasks of learning and decision-making implicated in depression and psychotherapy interventions. In collaborations with researchers running clinical intervention studies, she is testing the predictive power of these tools. She completed a Bachelor (University of Oxford) and Master (UZH) in Psychology and her training as clinical psychologist. In parallel, she did her PhD at the Translational Neuromodeling Unit in Zurich under the supervision of Quentin Huys focusing on relapse prediction after antidepressant discontinuation.

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Dr. Roeland Heerema – Postdoctoral researcher

Roeland researches emotions and the thinking patterns that cause them. Depending on how people appraise the outcomes of their actions, they might experience different kinds of positive and negative feelings. In particular, misattributing the cause of these outcomes to oneself versus external forces can be maladaptive, as is observed in the sense of ‘hopelessness’ that is common in depression. With behavioural experiments and computational modelling, Roeland studies how different emotions relate to choice behaviour and planning. His aim is to decode these emotional thinking patterns using MEG. Before joining the lab, Roeland did his PhD with Mathias Pessiglione at the Paris Brain Institute, where he investigated the role of mood fluctuations on economic decision-making.

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Dr. Taekwan Kim – Postdoctoral Researcher

Taekwan completed his PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Seoul National University, examining how habit bias occurs during decision-making processes and via imbalanced neurocircuits in compulsive disorders using computational cognitive modeling and neuroimaging. As a postdoc researcher in the Center for Neuroscience-inspired AI at KAIST, he continued his research to develop a computational model that integrates strategic decision-making and metamemory. His research focuses on understanding the neurocomputational mechanisms behind adaptive decision-making and applying cognitive theories to elucidate psychopathology.

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Dr. Haoyang Lu – Postdoctoral Researcher

Haoyang did his PhD in Integrated Life Sciences (Psychology) at Peking University, focusing on information sampling in autistic children through eye-tracking and computational modeling under the guidance of Professors Li Yi and Hang Zhang. He continued his research in Hang Zhang’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow, exploring the cognitive mechanisms behind superstitious beliefs. Haoyang holds a BSc in Psychology from Sun Yat-Sen University. His primary research interest lies in understanding the cognitive processes associated with a wide range of mental health issues, with the goal of translating this research into practical tools to benefit people.

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Dr. Anahit Mkrtchian – Postdoctoral Researcher

Anahit did her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, examining the motivational mechanisms driving the antidepressant effect of ketamine in treatment-resistant depression using cognitive, computational and neuroimaging (EEG/fMRI) methods. Prior to this, Anahit completed her MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, and her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of St Andrew. She is particularly interested in examining the neural representations of internal states, specifically those related to maladaptive cognition in depression and exploring these based on the coding principles of the hippocampal-entorhinal system.

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Dr. Michaela Poppe – Trial Manager

Michaela is a Clinical Trial Manager on the RELMED study. She studied Patholinguistics at the University of Potsdam in Germany and completed an MSc in Human Communication at UCL. She went on to do a PhD in Psychology at King’s College London investigating language function in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. Michaela worked on several clinical trials and qualitative studies in the fields of dementia and intellectual disability at UCL, Queen Mary University of London and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London.

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Dr. Zeguo Qiu (Elizabeth) – Postdoctoral Researcher

Elizabeth did her PhD in cognitive psychology/neuroscience at University of Queensland where she studied the neural processing of emotional faces and its interplay with visual awareness and attention, using EEG. She holds a Bachelor of Psychological Science (Honours Ⅰ) from University of Queensland and a Bachelor of Science in applied psychology from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She is interested in understanding a wide range of cognitive processes from human and animal neural data.

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Quentin Dercon – PhD Student

Quentin is a student on the UCL-Wellcome mental health science PhD programme. Prior to joining UCL, he completed a BA in neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and an MSc in medical statistics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He then worked as a research assistant at the Department of Psychiatry in Oxford, contributing to electronic health records studies of long COVID, and at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge in the Nord lab, investigating the effect of a psychotherapeutic intervention (“cognitive distancing”) on reinforcement learning (RL) and momentary affect in a large online study. He is particularly interested in the computational mechanisms of psychiatric treatment (non-)response, and while in the lab will be developing and piloting online tasks to assay the effect of different antidepressant classes on various RL domains. 

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Anna Hall – PhD student

Anna is a PhD student on the UCL-Wellcome Mental Health Science and the IMPRS PhD programmes. She completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Bath, with a clinical placement year at the Evelina Children’s Hospital, followed by an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of York. She then worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, examining the longitudinal development of executive functions in infants to allow earlier identification of neurodevelopmental and mental health difficulties, before starting her PhD at UCL.
Anna is interested in how computational methods can be used to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying transdiagnostic symptoms and current treatments for mood disorders to ultimately inform future interventions. Her current project is exploring mechanisms of anhedonia.

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Jakub Onysk – PhD student

Jakub is a PhD student on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme. He’s interested in finding out which neuro-computational mechanisms are engaged throughout the process of psychotherapy as well as how self-report is generated with the goal of extracting clinically relevant measures. Jakub’s journey began with the study of Mathematics and Philosophy at Exeter, which led him to pursue an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh, where he focused on computational psychiatry of eating disorders. Before joining the PhD, he worked as Research Assistant at the Computational and Biological Learning lab at the University of Cambridge looking into mechanisms underlying pain perception, in particular temporal statistical learning and its significance for chronic pain.

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Jade Serfaty – PhD Student

Jade is a PhD student in the LiDo programme. She completed an MSci in Neuroscience at UCL, during which she worked on whole-brain neural population dynamics in the zebrafish at the Bianco lab. She then completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at ENS Paris, during which she worked on spontaneous approach-avoidance choices in a social context at the LNC2 in the Social Cognition team before starting her PhD at UCL. Her rotation project in the lab focuses on novel approaches to study introspective self-reports of emotions.

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Nikita Singh – Research Assistant

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Raziya Zharmakhan – Research Assistant

Raziya joined the lab as a Research Assistant after completing her master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. For her master’s thesis, she investigated implicit indices of learning in appetitive Pavlovian conditioning, by training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier on EEG data. She is especially interested in applying machine learning techniques to investigate how higher cognitive function abnormalities relate to mental disorders and manifest in the structure and activation patterns of the brain.

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