I am currently a postdoc at Dr Lauren Atlas' Affective Neuroscience and Pain Lab at NIH/NCCIH, where I apply data science and machine learning tools to facial expressions of pain. The project is in collaboration with NIMH Machine Learning Core.
I have defended my PhD with Distinction!
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Hi, I am Marie! I am a machine learning geek (MSc in AI from the University of Edinburgh, UK), a neuroscience nerd (MSc in Neurobiology from the University of Porto, Portugal), and my ultimate career goal is to use advanced ML tools to solve meaningful challenges in the domain of health and medicine.
As my next step towards this goal, I am starting a postdoc position at the National Institutes of Health (USA) immediately upon finishing my PhD (summer 2025), during which I apply ML to facial expressions of pain.
I just defended my PhD in Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering. The overarching topic of my PhD research was affective neuroscience, my PhD thesis was titled "Assessment reliability and treatment of depression". Over the course of my PhD, I was involved in various projects that address diagnosis and treatment of adolescent and adult depression. Specifically, I worked with children's multimodal data to validate depression measurements and gather insights in topics such as informant discrepancy (parent-child disagreement on whether the child is depressed) (paper). I've also contributed to collecting and analyzing multi-echo MRI data with the goal of improving the targeting of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for treatment-resistant depression (pilot dataset). I am also interested in neuropsychoendocrinology, specifically in the effect of oxytocin on the human brain (paper) and its role in various psychiatric disorders.
During my PhD at NIMH, I was supervised by Dr Daniel Pine at the Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience (SDAN) and mentored by Dr Dylan Nielson at the NIMH Machine Learning Core. I was also mentored by Prof Argyris Stringaris at the UCL. My host academic institution was the University of Lisbon in Portugal, where I was a member of Dr Diana Prata's lab.
Before joining NIMH, I spent a few years doing social neuroscience research
at Diana Prata's Lab. In particular, I looked at the effect of oxytocin on human
resting-state EEG (2022 paper in Cerebral Cortex).
Before that, I obtained a MSc in Neurobiology from the University of Porto and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh,
where I analyzed human eye-tracking data. From my studies at the University of Edinburgh, I have a background in Natural Language Processing.
I enjoy working with large datasets and apply a variety of computational tools to analyze them. As far as programming languages go, I'm most comfortable with Python, but I've also been exposed to R and Matlab.
For statistical analysis, I've used SPSS, but I prefer R or R wrappers in Python.
I have bipolar disorder type 1, which makes me extra passionate about mental health research, gives me personal insights, and motivates my interest in academic resilience.
Outside of research, I enjoy spending time in nature (hiking, backpacking, camping) and board games. I love reading, traveling (I have lived in four countries and I am currently enjoying exploring the US), theatre and art museums.