ELIANA VASSENA | Post doc
Eliana Vassena completed her BSc degree in Psychology in 2008 and her MSc in Neuropsychology in 2010 at the University of Milan Bicocca. In 2014 she obtained a PhD in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Ghent under the supervision of Tom Verguts. Her PhD focused on characterizing the neural basis of motivation with fMRI, TMS and computational modeling, with a special focus on cognitive effort.
As a post-doc, she has worked with Dr. William Alexander on testing and translating computational models of Prefrontal Cortex to the domain of motivation and effortful behavior. In 2016 she joined Roshan Cools and Ole Jensen’s two different labs at the Donders Institute with a Marie Curie fellowship. Her current project investigates interactions between Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in prediction and motivation. She is also interested in computational psychiatry and translation of Prefrontal Cortex models and effort-based decision-making paradigms to psychiatric populations.