Dr E. Vassena (Eliana)

My work combines neuroscience with computational psychiatry to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety.

I'm a neuroscientist with a clinical background, interested in how the brain guides motivated effortful behaviour, decides which actions are worth pursuing, and boosts behaviour towards success. These mechanisms are impaired in psychiatric disorders (such as depression) and sub-clinical conditions (such as burnout). I study how alteration of brain circuits driving motivation and effort leads to pathology. I use functional MRI, computational modelling and Artificial Intelligence approaches, experimental measures of behaviour, physiology, neurostimulation, and pharmacology.

I am a fellow and currently active chair of the Radboud Young Academy. The RYA is a local collective of scholars with the mission of improving academic culture and promoting interdisciplinary collaborations. We run a variety of projects on the important topics of internationalisation, diversity and inclusion, well-being, challenges of interdisciplinary work, open science, team science, and many more.

I contributed the https://www.winrepo.org/ initiative (which I highly recommend), to improve gender balance at conferences. I served on the Donders Diversity and Sustainable science initiative. I am engaged in outreach through several online platforms and as associate editor (after being editor in chief) of https://it.in-mind.org/. I am also a member of Young NeuroLabNL (supported by the NWA route NeuroLabNL), and coordinator of BCB-NL (a platform for researchers in the fields of brain, cognition and behaviour in the Netherlands).

• Perception, Action and Decision-making
• Natural Computing & Neurotechnology

• Affective Neuroscience
• Cognitive Affective Neuroscience
• Neuronal Oscillations
• Motivational and Cognitive control