<strong>David Mathar</strong>

David Mathar

for­mer PhD candidate

   

David stud­ied math­e­mat­ics at the TU Kaiser­slautern until 2008. In his mas­ter the­sis he ana­lyzed the earth’s grav­i­ty sig­nal derived from satel­lite mea­sure­ments. He was inter­est­ed in detect­ing local grav­i­ty field anom­alies in areas with strong vol­canic activ­i­ty (e.g. Ice­land, Hawaii) uti­liz­ing so called Wavelets. As a lat­er­al entrant in the field of neu­ro­science, he focus­es on obe­si­ty-relat­ed alter­ations in reward-based learn­ing and cost-ben­e­fit deci­sion-mak­ing process­es. Specif­i­cal­ly, in his lat­est PhD project he’s aim­ing at reveal­ing if obese sub­jects show alter­ations in the trade-off between phys­i­cal effort as a form of costs and dif­fer­ent types of rewards (e.g. high-caloric snacks, mon­ey, etc.) dur­ing cost-ben­e­fit deci­sions. Beside basic behav­ioral mea­sure­ments, he uses func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) tech­niques to detect the neur­al cor­re­lates that under­lie the behav­ioral observations.