Curriculum Vitae

Supervisor: Dr. Stéphane Chiocchi

Committee: Dr. Antoine Adamantidis, Dr. Benjamin Grewe, Dr. Andrew Macaskill

Group: Systems Neuroscience

Institute: Department of Physiology, University of Bern

Project: Anticipatory coding of anxiety in the ventral hippocampus

Investigation of the role of ventral hippocampus (vHip) in the anticipation of the anxiogenic experience. To address this question, I developed a novel trial-based anxiety paradigm, the forced emotional-shifting task (FEST), with sequential and separated exposure to an anxiogenic situation (an elevated, bright and open space) or a safe situation (closed and darker space). By performing in vivo single-unit recordings from the vHip of freely-moving mice during FEST, we identified both anxiety neurons as well as a distinct neuronal population with ramping activity in the safe configuration of FEST, suggestive of an anticipatory coding for anxiety.

Supervisor: Dr. Bart Rutten, Dr. Joris Vangeneugden

Group: MHεNs School for Mental Health and Neuroscience & Stork Lab

Institute: Psychiatry and Neuropsychology – Maastricht, The Netherlands & Department of Genetics & Molecular biology – Magdeburg, Germany

Project: Understanding susceptibility to traumatic stress: Molecular analysis of an animal PTSD model

The project was part of a research consortium with an aim of completing an in-depth understanding of the underlying mechanisms of genetic susceptibility to PTSD across different species. In the first part, I assisted in the development and efficiency characterisation of specific primers. In the second part, I had to perform an ex vivo investigation of the effect of stress (depending on the time point of occurrence) on the excitation and inhibition patterns within the different ventral hippocampus sub-layers, using immunohistochemical techniques.

Supervisor: Dr.Ethimios M.C Skoulakis, Dr. George Mosialos

Group: Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Behaviour

Institute: Biomedical Research center Alexander Fleming, Athens, Greece

Project: Genes interacting with Neuralized protein regulate Long-term Memory in D. melanogaster

Investigation of the formation of long-term memory (LTM) in wild type/and mutants of Drosophila melanogaster, using a negatively reinforced operant olfactory conditioning paradigm. During this period, I developed my own behavioural set-up and completed a series of experiments to characterize the gain of function in LTM by overexpressing the Neuralized protein.

Supervisor: Dr.Pieter Roelfsema, Dr. Ulf H Schnabel, Dr. Sreedeep Mukherjee

Group: Vision and Cognition

Institute: Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Project: Figure ground segregation in behaving mice

During this period, I got hands-on experience in working with head-fixed mice during a visual discrimination task while performing in vivo multiunit recordings or 2-photon imaging. I managed to get practical experience in working with behaving animals as long as basic principles of neuronal interogation while improving my analytical skills (-see acknowledgments in L. Kirchberger, S. Mukherjee, U. H. Schnabel, E. H. van Beest, A. Barsegyan, C. N. Levelt, J. A. Heimel, J. A. M. Lorteije, C. van der Togt, M. W. Self, P. R. Roelfsema, The essential role of recurrent processing for figure-ground perception in mice. Sci. Adv. 7, eabe1833 (2021).)