People

Meet the academic staff who work in the Research Centre for Clinical, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience and discover their research interests and activities.

You can find out more about each member of staff, including their latest publications and their contact details by following the links below.

Members

Professor Danai Dima

Head of Department Psychology & Neuroscience, Centre Co-Director, Professor of Psychology

Professor Dima's research focuses on the study of cognition and psychosis, mainly employing neuroimaging methods and connectivity analyses in combination with genetics.

Professor Tina Forster

Centre Co-Director, Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience

Professor Forster researches the brain processes that underlie perception of ones body by using electroencephalography (EEG) to track changes of electrical brain activity.

Dr Anne-Kathrin Fett

Centre Co-Director, Reader in Biological and Clinical Psychology

Dr Fett's research uses psychological, epidemiological and neuroscience approaches to study the mechanisms that underlie different aspects of social functioning, such as loneliness and social isolation, in the general population and in individuals with psychotic disorders and other mental health conditions.

Professor Emmanuel Pothos

Professor of Psychology

Professor Pothos' research interests are in the fields of decision making and reasoning, learning processes and attentional biases in clinical and health psychology. He has worked with a range of computational frameworks for cognitive modelling, including ones based on information theory, flexible representation spaces, Bayesian methods and, more recently, quantum theory.

Dr Kielan Yarrow

Reader in Psychology

Dr Yarrow's research interests include multisensory perception (particularly temporal perception), attention, decision making, and action.

Anna Lambrechts

Lecturer in Psychology

Anna Lambrechts is a cognitive neuroscientist. Her current work explores the temporal dynamics of communication in ASD. In addition, she investigates learning and reward processing in autistic children and adults who present complex needs such as learning difficulties and language delays.

Dr Elliot Freeman

Reader of Psychology

Dr Freeman's current research focusses on how people differ in their ability to put sight and sound together. His methods are primarily behavioural (psychophysics), but he has also worked on projects involving functional and anatomical fMRI, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG. He is also beginning to experiment with transcranial electrical stimulation.

Dr Beatriz Calvo Merino

Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience

Professor Calvo-Merino's current research investigates the sensorimotor neural and cognitive underpinnings of aesthetic perception of performing arts, in particular dance.

Dr Lauren Cooper

Reader of Psychology

Dr Knott's research focusses on the formation of recollective errors in memory, understanding factors that impact error formation, in particular the emotional saliency of information encoded and the length of time between exposure and recollection.

Dr Corinna Haenschel

Professor of Psychology

Dr Haenschel's research interest is in applying behavioural measures, neurophysiological techniques and functional imaging during cognitive tasks in both normal and clinical populations. Recently, she has been particularly interested in the importance of early stimulus encoding on visual working memory performance.

Dr Sophie Lind

Reader in Psychology

Dr Lind's Research interests lie in developmental psychology, developmental disorders (particularly autism spectrum disorder), memory (particularly episodic and autobiographical memory), future-oriented thinking, theory of mind, metacognition, self-awareness, spatial navigation and executive function.

Dr Ansgar Endress

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Ansgar Endress is a behavioural scientist with key contributions in fields from evolutionary behavioural science to language acquisition to memory processes to social behaviour. Dr Endress is interested in how seemingly simple psychological mechanisms shared with other animals shape human-specific traits such as language.

Dr Francesco Rigoli

Reader in Psychology

Dr. Rigoli's current research examines the psychological processes underlying broad cultural phenomena such as in politics and in religion. These areas are investigated adopting a multidisciplinary approach integrating computational modelling, cognitive neuroscience, and sociology.

Dr Mehdi Keramati

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Keramati's Research interests include neuroeconomics and behavioural economics, associative learning, planning, and decision making, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, and drug and food addiction.

Dr Andreas Jarvstad

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Jarvstad's work is on learning, inference and decision-making - across a wide range of domains.

Dr Carsten Allefeld

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Allefeld is a cognitive neuroscientist with a background in physics and philosophy. His research is about developing and improving statistical models and data analysis methods for neuroimaging (EEG, fMRI) and behavioural data. His work tries to make concepts of physics, nonlinear dynamics, systems theory, and information theory fruitful for cognitive neuroscience and psychology. He is particularly interested in the relation between neural and mental states.

Dr Dimitrios Pinotsis

Reader in Psychology

Dr Pinotsis' recent work exploits deep neural networks and hierarchical Bayesian inference to understand the causes of neurological and psychiatric disorders. He also exploits brain recordings to build better artificial intelligence algorithms.

Dr Lucia Garrido

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Garrido's research areas include cognitive neuroscience, visual perception, and social perception. Her research attempts to shed light on the perceptual mechanisms that we use in our social interactions. She is interested in how we use information from faces and voices to recognise who someone is, to infer their emotional and mental states, and to decide how we should act towards them.

Dr Paul Bretherton

Psychology Technician

Dr. Bretherton’s research mainly focusses on the study of the neural mechanics of human visual system, with a particular focus on Attention, Perception, Memory, and Learning. A secondary interest is the impact that stress and emotion have on cognitive performance, particularly Attention, Perception, Memory and Learning.

Professor Mark Howe

Professor of Psychology

Professor Howe's research interests are in adaptive memory and its development, autobiographical memory, false memory, false memory priming of problem solving, mathematical and computational models of memory, reasoning, and their development, memory development in children and adults, memory and emotion, memory and the law, and memory in traumatised and maltreated children

Dr Andreas Kappes

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Kappes is interested in how the unavoidable uncertainty in all our social decisions affects our behaviour, how and when we are influenced by others, and how we learn about ourselves and others. He has a strong interest in evidence-based policy, especially in relation to infectious diseases and pandemics.

Dr Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni

Honorary Research Fellow

PhD thesis: Social contagion beyond humans: an investigation on contagious yawning, exploring visual, auditory and tactile perception of a non-biological agent (an android) in primates and humans with intact vision and blind.

Dr Vivien Chan

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr. Kit Ying (Vivien) Chan is a Cognitive Psychologist with a research focus on Psycholinguistics. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and foreign-accented speech processing. She studies how foreign accents influence native listeners during speech perception, accent perception and other cognitive processing, such as memory and learning. She also investigates how the pronunciation and similarity relations of second-language words are represented differently in the lexicon of second-language learners.

Dr Themis Karaminis

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr. Themis Karaminis joined City, University of London in December 2023 as a Lecturer in Psychology. His research primarily focuses on individual differences in cognitive development and learning, employing experimental and computational methodologies.

Dr Hannah Thompson

Lecturer in Psychology

Hannah Thompson is a neuropsychologist whose focus of research is stroke, and its impact on language (e.g., aphasia), and memory (particularly semantic memory). She is also interested in the intersection of deficits or capabilities across cognition, including executive function and creativity.

Dr Steven Samuel

Lecturer in Psychology

Steven Samuel is a cognitive psychologist whose interests include language (particularly bilingualism), perspective taking ('theory of mind'), and cognitive representation (how we code in our heads things that exist outside of our minds).

Dr James Yearsley

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

James Yearsley works in the field of mathematical psychology, specifically trying to build and test computational models of non-normative decision making. These can be anything from simple perceptual decisions about shapes or moving dots, to much more complex choices, such as how to split a windfall between yourself and a charity. In many such decisions people don't always behave rationally.

Dr Tegan Penton

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Trudy Edginton

Reader in Psychology

Dr Trudi Edginton is a Clinical Psychologist, CBT therapist and Mindfulness practitioner with research interests in Neuropsychology, Psychopharmacology, Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Rehabilitation. Trudi completed her degree, PhD and post-doctoral research at the University of Sussex working with individuals with long term health conditions. Trudi works clinically with individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury, Hydrocephalus and Spina bifida, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Anxiety Disorders and Dementia.

Dr Claudia Civai

Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Behavioural Economics)

Dr Claudia Civai is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Behavioural Economics); she joined City in June 2024. Her research focuses on understanding how people react to unfairness and inequality, and exploring what leads people to cooperate, reciprocate trust and behave fairly. Her research uses the methodological and theoretical framework of Decision Neuroscience (Psychology + Neuroscience + Behavioural Economics).

Dr Cristina Martinelli

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr Cristina Martinelli joined City St Georges, University of London in 2024. Her PhD and Fellowship were both funded by the National Institute of Health Research-Biomedical Research Centre. In 2008, Dr Martinelli obtained the eligibility to practice as a Clinical Psychologist in her home country, and has been on the HCPC register as a Clinical Psychologist since 2023. Her research focuses on the mechanisms that go awry in psychopathology, with a particular emphasis on disordered eating in clinical and non-clinical populations.

Dr Tommaso Currò

Visiting Lecturer

Dr Currò's research focuses on cognitive motor control using behavioural and electrophysiological methods. His research also explores altered states of consciousness and hypnosis, integrating these insights into both clinical practice and research, and pro-environmental behaviour. Dr Currò is a registered psychologist and hypnotherapist.

Dr Yasemin Genç

Post-Doctoral Researcher & Teaching Fellow

Dr Yasemin Genç is a social cognitive psychologist. She is interested in biases and belief updating, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying these processes, particularly in relation to science communication, sense-making, and information integration.

Dr Anna Ubiali

Teaching Fellow & Researcher

Dr Anna Ubiali is a cognitive and behavioural researcher studying the mechanisms through which preferences shape decision-making. Her work focuses on exploring the flexibility of these preferences and the conditions under which they might change. She employs cognitive interventions to understand how individuals adapt their choices and update their preferences in response to new learning.