ORGANISERS
Prof. Dr. Merle Fairhurst (TU Dresden)
Merle is a cognitive neuroscientist with strong interdisciplinary ties that facilitate crosstalk with 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.
Dr. Marieke van Vugt (University of Groningen)
Marieke is an assistant professor in the cognitive modeling group at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She obtained her PhD with Michael Kahana in the neuroscience program of the University of Pennsylvania, after having spent one year at Brandeis University. After that she did a postdoc with Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University.
The main question that guides her research is: how do we think? In what ways do we mind-wander? When is it helpful, and when is it not? And how can we make our thinking more adaptive by means of contemplative practices such as mindfulness and meditation. She likes to use mathematical models and techniques to better understand those very complicated data. This model-based neuroscience approach allows us to think about the mechanism by which someone thinks, and make more detailed predictions than verbal models. In addition to that, she is fascinated by how two brains think together, which she investigates in the laboratory with EEG hyperscanning, but also in more real-life situations such as Tibetan monastic debate and dance performances.
Dr. Valentina Cazzato
Valentina carried out her Ph.D., titled ‘Reflexive Social Attention modulated by Social Cues: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies’ at ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome (Italy), which she completed in December 2010. Following this she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Udine (Italy) on a project titled ‘Neurofunctional Alterations of body representation in Eating Disorder patients’ (2011-2014). After a a period as Lecturer in Psychology at University of Bradford, she has recently joined the School of Natural Sciences and Psychology as Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Psychology. Her research interests span a broad range of topics, focusing on the psychological and neural basis of body representations across the lifespan in healthy populations and in individuals with Eating Disorders and Body Dysmorphic Disorder, investigated by means of neurophysiological techniques (TMS and tDCS) and fMRI.