Dur­ing her under­grad­u­ate years at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hei­del­berg (B.A. Phi­los­o­phy and Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture, B.Sc. Psy­chol­o­gy), Maria acquired a taste for neu­rocog­ni­tive research in psy­chi­a­try. For her under­grad­u­ate dis­ser­ta­tion, she worked on the effects of SSRIs on emo­tion­al pro­cess­ing in a healthy vol­un­teer mod­el of depres­sion at the Psy­chophar­ma­col­o­gy and Emo­tion Research Lab (PERL) in Oxford. She fol­lowed this up with a degree in Neu­ro­science at King’s Col­lege Lon­don, where she worked with Dr. Gem­ma Modi­nos on func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty of the stria­tum in schizo­typy using mul­ti-echo rest­ing-state data. In Novem­ber 2017, Maria joined our Lab to inves­ti­gate the shared and dif­fer­en­tial neu­rocog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms of obe­si­ty and binge eat­ing dis­or­der, employ­ing behav­iour­al and MR imag­ing tech­niques informed by com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el­ling.