Eliana Vassena is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Psychopathology at the Behavioural Science Institute (Radboud University) and senior researcher at the Donders Institute (Radboudumc). Her work combines neuroscience with computational psychiatry, studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie psychiatric disorders such as depression. She is particularly interested in the neural mechanisms of motivation and decision-making in healthy people and psychiatric patients. She uses behavioural measures (in the lab and online), neuroimaging, pharmacology and computational modelling to understand the cognitive underpinnings of motivational deficits. Her goal is to develop novel computational phenotyping methods for precision psychiatry (better diagnosis and treatment selection).

 

Eliana is highly committed to promote diversity and sustainability. She is a member of the https://www.winrepo.org/ initiative, to improve diversity in academia and a member of the Donders Diversity and Sustainable science initiative. She also engages in outreach through several online platforms and is editor in chief of https://it.in-mind.org/. Her core motivation is to promote diversity, sustainability and outreach within and outside the neuroscience community.