Education and research interests
I received my PhD in July 2012 at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Germany. During my doctoral studies, I have explored the morphological and the hemodynamic correlates of associative learning (i.e. fear conditioning) in the human amygdala and hippocampus, using structural and functional neuroimaging methodologies. Subsequently I moved to the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (BrainLab) at the University of Barcelona, where I currently hold a postdoctoral position. I have two main lines of research. In the field of clinical/affective neuroscience, I am interested in studying the neuroplasticity of learning and memory and the role of genetic susceptibility risk variants in determining the onset of psychopathology. In the cognitive neuroscience area, I am interested in investigating how the brain organizes and segregates sensorial information to build up meaningful perceptual objects, principally in the auditory domain. In particular, I study the process of auditory regularity encoding and deviance detection along the hierarchically organized auditory pathway, using EEG and fMRI. I am also deeply interested in the neural bases of music perception and musically evoked emotions.