I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate advised by Yael Niv at Princeton Neuroscience Institute & Department of Psychology. Broadly, I am interested in how people use valenced (i.e. positive and negative) information to understand and organise the world and their experiences, and how mood can be a mechanism of this. Particularly I am interested in rumination; repetitive negative thinking about one’s negative feelings, and the causes and implications of them. I am currently working on theoretical models of the dynamics of a ruminative episode to understand why some individuals engage in this painful behavior more than others.

I first became interested in mood and decision making while completing my PhD at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research in 2021 with a thesis entitled ‘Asymmetries Between Gains and Losses in Mood and Decision Making’ supervised by Robb Rutledge. I have a masters degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (UCL) and a first class bachelors degree in Art & Psychology from the University of Reading.

I am passionate about making computational modelling transparent and understandable to those working directly with clinical populations. I am very interested in projects that focus on systematic change in academia and beyond. I have been a volunteer with the Prison Teaching Initiative in New Jersey since 2022 and more recently as an Adjunct Instructor with the Returning & Incarcerated Student Education program at Raritan Valley Community College.

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CV

I have worked on many public engagement/science communication projects using arts to engage people with neuroscience, cognitive science and mental health. You can see many examples here. Please connect if you want to work with me in future! I have co-commissioned artwork, organised panel discussions and ran data hacks with partners including Science Museum, London, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and Kings College London.

I am also a practicing artist. You can see many of my paintings here, and some of my (more amateur) film photography here.

 

Photo taken by an old friend in LA, Emma Weston