I did my undergraduate studies in Psychology and Economics at Tufts University, an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University, and a PhD in Cognitive Science at MIT. My PhD research focused on dissociations and interactions between the human cortical networks for language and Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to reason about others’ mental states. Language and ToM are closely related in development and adult cognition (and likely in evolution), and yet, in a series of fMRI studies, we found that by adulthood core language regions are largely spatially dissociated from ToM regions within individuals, but that the two networks are nevertheless functionally synchronized in temporal fluctuations of their activity, suggesting a potential signature of their interaction. In my postdoc, I am studying the dynamics and neural mechanisms of decision-making under uncertainty, aiming to gain insight into the separable contributions of uncertainty reduction and reward maximization in balancing exploration and exploitation in changing environments. With recently developed anatomical MRI sequences and model-based functional MRI, we will investigate the contributions of noradrenergic and dopaminergic subcortical nuclei, and a large-scale network of cortical regions, to gambling decisions with changing and variably predictable rewards.
