Our team

Merle T. Fairhurst

Merle is a cognitive neuroscientist with strong interdisciplinary ties that facilitate crosstalk with engineers and philosophers. She studies the interaction between sensory signals that allow us to make sense of the world around us and to successfully interact with others. Her projects range from trying to understand what makes touch special to identifying factors that make interacting in a group different to interacting in pairs. As a classical singer, she is passionate about the special cases of sensory perception in music and art. And, as a mother of five, she strongly believes in promoting women in academia.

Expertise: Cognitive Neuroscientist

Research interest: How touch teaches our other senses to understand the world and others in it

Favourite touch experience: Loves to knead yeast dough

Post-doc Researchers

Irene Valori

Irene has expertise in Developmental and Clinical Psychology. She completed her masters’ and doctoral studies at the University of Padova, Italy, delving into perceptual, motor, and cognitive aspects of humans’ interaction with virtual environments. Her previous work focused on the potential of VR to promote child development and support individuals with neurodevelopmental conditions such as Autism and ADHD. She joins the Chair of Acoustic and Haptic Engineering at the TU Dresden, and the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI).

Irene is currently working on the Trust and Touch project, to investigate the role of affective touch in promoting interpersonal trust in technology-mediated human-to-human exchanges or human-machine interactions. Her research aims to explore individual differences in tactile emotional vocabulary (how do people use and perceive touch that conveys different emotional meanings?), with a focus on differences related to developmental trajectories, culture, and gender. https://ceti.one/irenevalori/

Expertise: Developmental psychologist

Research interest: How children touch objects and other people to learn about the external world and the self

Favourite touch experience: Loves to put her feet in the sand

PhD Students

Benjamin Rieger

Ben is a Neurophilosopher, Audiotechnician, Music producer and Concert Organizer based in Munich who is an external PhD Student at the TU Dresden. Music and the communities surrounding it has always played an important role in his life and his passion for philosophy and science has led him to study philosophy at the LMU Munich and pursue interdisciplinary projects in the field of neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology. Combining neuroscience, music and philosophy for his PhD integrates his biggest passions and interests with one another.

After researching the universality of lullabies through their universal tempo range, Benjamin currently examines the relationship between lullabies, affective touch and arousal by investigating the coupling mechanisms of the two behaviours and researching the similar procession through bio- and neurofeedback. Studying the dynamics of singing and touch tempo in live settings will be insightful for understanding these behaviours and developing new therapeutic approaches in the future.

Expertise: Philosophy of Mind, Neurophilosophy, Neuroscience of Music, Musicproduction and Composition, Bioethics

Research Interest: Affective Touch, Lullabies and Sleep Music, Evolution of Musical Behaviour, Cooperation and Altruism, Deception and Self-Deception, Trauma and Depression Therapy

Favourite Touch Experience: A really warm welcoming hug

Louise Staring

Louise holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the Free University of Brussels, where she recently started her doctoral training. She specialised in biological psychology during her master’s degree and has since gained clinical experience in the field of youth mental healthcare. Thus, she is very interested in the intersection between biological and developmental psychology. In her master’s thesis, she studied how a 4-week daily gentle stroking touch intervention improved infant psychophysiological stress-regulation and resilience, which has driven her to further investigate the underlying mechanisms of parental affective touch.

Sensitouch: Funded by the Research Foundation Flanders, Louise is investigating how infants’ sensitivity to affective touch develops in early life, and how that is shaped by their developmental context in a longitudinal study where she studies mothers, fathers/partners, and infants. Also, with the future goal of detecting infants’ sensitivity to affective touch in an accessible and clinically relevant manner, she is studying whether infants can visually distinguish affective from non-affective touch, and if so, what underlying mechanisms are at play.

Expertise: Clinical psychology

Research Interest: how our early life experiences and interactions shape who we become

Favourite touch experience: the feeling of soft, freshly laundered bedsheets after a hot shower

Research Assistants

Wenhan Sun

Wenhan is currently a PhD student at LMU Munich and has a multidisciplinary background. He has conducted many touch-related and fun experiments the last few years, such as integrating haptic stimuli to online experiments, simulating affective touch in VR. He is very passionate about the relatively underlooked sense of touch, and hopes to contribute in both understanding touch and integrating it in other technologies.

Touch and Trust: Wenhan is working on a project in which affective touch is simulated in VR. The project integrates this technology to control the contexts in which people perceive touch, and aims to establish the potential use of other devices to simulate human touch. This opens the door to an amazing world of digital / human-machine interaction.

Expertise: Analysing behavioural and physiological data, creating experiments

Research Interest: How we perceive and utilise touch, as well as how our bodies react to touch

Favourite touch experience: Violin vibrating gracefully under my fingers

Yasemin Abra

Yasemin majored in biology and is currently pursuing a master's degree in neuro-cognitive psychology at LMU Munich. Her acting experience has allowed her to implement practices in theatre to her research, where she is currently using the Mirror Game to investigate coordination dynamics as a function of expertise and writing her thesis at the NEVIA Lab on interpersonal synchrony and autism-like traits. She is a scholar of the Neuropsychoanalysis Association and is studying under Prof. Mark Solms.

The Effect of Expertise in Creative Coordination in Groups Using a Novel Zoom-based Mirror Game: Humans coordinate in groups not only for functional purposes, but to achieve greater creative potential. Although the dynamics underpinning creative coordination have received attention in recent years, no previous research has investigated the effect of expertise on how we interact within a group. In this study, we investigate how coordination and complexity of movement in a Zoom-based Mirror Game are influenced by expertise, and how this combination affects the way we feel about others.

Expertise: Neuro-cognitive psychology

Research Interest: How nonverbal interaction dynamics help us keep together in time

Favourite touch experience: Playing with brown sugar

Juliette Fairhurst

Juliette is bachelor's student at Heidelberg University studying computational linguistics and classical philology.

Expertise: Computational Linguistics

Research Interest: How different people experience touch and how to use touch to make people feel more at ease

Favourite touch experience: Petting kittens

Jasmin Merkel

Jasmin holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and plans to pursue her Masters in clinical psychology. Her interests include the developmental and clinical implications of early tactile experiences and how social touch can facilitate connection and synchrony between humans.

Expertise: Psychology

Research Interest: The role of touch in early human development, interpersonal synchrony

Giulia Anilia Gambaretti

Giulia is studying Neuroscience and neuropsychological rehabilitation at the University of Padua.

Expertise: Neuroscience

Research interest: Interpersonal synchrony and neuro-imaging techniques

Favourite touch experience: immerse my fingers into the waves

Former students and research assistants

Giovanna Furlan

Giovanna has a BSc in Psychological Science and broad interest in the reasons underlying social media excessive use. After a year with us, she left for a new adventure and will start a Master's degree at UCL, London.