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I am a third-year PhD candidate at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), NIH, USA. At the NIH, I am co-supervised by Dr Daniel Pine at the Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience (SDAN) and Dr Bruno Averbeck at the Laboratory of Neuropsychology, and mentored by Dr Dylan Nielson at the NIMH Machine Learning Team. I am also mentored by Prof Argyris Stringaris at the UCL. My host academic institution is the University of Lisbon in Portugal, where I am a member of Dr Diana Prata's lab.
My big research interest is affective neuroscience. Specifically, I work 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), reward processing and its neural correlates. I am also interested in neuropsychoendocrinology, specifically in the role of oxytocin in various psychiatric disorders and the effect of dopamine and serotonin in depression and bipolar disorder. I work with large datasets and apply a variety of computational tools to analyze them.
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 an MSc in Neurobiology from the University of Porto
and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh,
where I analysed human eye-tracking data. From my studies at the University of Edinburgh, I have a background in Natural Language Processing.
I live with bipolar disorder type 1, and I am an active participant of the NIH's DEIA activities.
Outside of research, I enjoy spending time in nature (hiking, backpacking, camping) and winter sports. I am also a theatre lover and a travel enthusiast.