People

Meet the academic staff who work in the Centre for Cognition and Neuroscienceand 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.

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 Franklyn Howe

Centre Co-Director, Professor of Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Professor Franklyn Howe is a physicist who researches how biomarkers can be developed from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) for a better mechanistic understanding of disease. He combines multimodal MRI/S, quantitative image analysis, and artificial intelligence to identify imaging biomarkers that support diagnosis, prognosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of therapeutic response. He has led and collaborated on research spanning brain tumours (a key focus), osteoarthritis, cerebrovascular disease, lymphatic imaging and neurodegenerative disorders.

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 Tom Barrick

Reader in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Dr Barrick's research focus is imaging biomarker development for disease diagnosis and prognosis.

Dr Angeliki Bogosian

Health psychologist

Dr Bogosian's research focuses on psychological and physiological mechanisms underlying wellbeing in long-term neurological conditions, with a particular focus on Parkinson’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis. Her work aims to understand how processes such as interoception (the perception of internal bodily signals), psychological flexibility, and emotional adjustment influence non-motor symptoms and wellbeing, and how these mechanisms can inform the development of novel psychological and behavioural interventions. Her research combines psychological theory with translational and interdisciplinary approaches, including behavioural interventions, physiological measurement, patient involvement methodologies, and emerging technologies to improve wellbeing in neurological populations.

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 Vivien Chan

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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 Claudia Civai

Senior Lecturer in Psychology (Behavioural Economics)

Dr 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 Lauren Cooper

Reader of Psychology

Dr Cooper'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 Catherine Doogan

Senior Lecturer in Neuropsychology and Neuroscience and Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist & Psychology Research Lead (gesh)

Dr Doogan's research focus is Neuropsychological Rehabilitation including developing adjustments for people living with Neurological Conditions and their carers/close others. She also has co-designed and developed digital interventions in neurorehabilitation to facilitate therapy for people with language and communication difficulties (aphasia).

Professor Trudy Edginton

Professor

Professor 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 Ansgar Endress

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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.

Professor Tina Forster

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 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.

Professor Peter Garrard

Professor of Neurology

Professor Garrard's main research interests are young onset dementia, language disorders and corpus and computational linguistics.

Dr Lucia Garrido

Reader 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.

Professor Corinna Haenschel

Professor of Psychology

Professor 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.

Professor Atticus Hainsworth

Professor of Cerebrovascular Disease

Professor Hainsworth leads a programme of stroke and dementia research at City St George's, University of London. He is an international expert on cerebral small vessel disease, the principal cause of lacunar stroke and the most common vascular contributor to dementia. His work addresses the pathological processes that underlie small vessel disease and associated white matter lesions, combining human brain tissue from large post-mortem cohorts with preclinical models and clinical trials. He has a particular interest in repurposing licensed drugs, including PDE5 inhibitors, for vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia. He was Chief Investigator on the PASTIS trial (NCT02450253), which used arterial spin labelling MRI to test the effect of a single dose of tadalafil on cerebral perfusion in small vessel disease. He read Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD at Rush Medical Center, Chicago, followed by postdoctoral work in Oxford and a Wellcome travelling fellowship in Paris. He serves as Deputy Editor of the journal Cerebral Circulation – Cognition and Behaviour.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atticus-hainsworth-26650039/

Michael Hart

Senior Lecturer in Neurosurgery

Hart specialises in functional neurosurgery and neuroimaging for movement disorders, pain, and epilepsy.

Dr Jeremy Isaacs

Consultant Neurologist

Dr Isaacs' research focus is functional cognitive disorder, Alzheimer's and vascular dementia.

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 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 Themis Karaminis

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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 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.

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 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 Cristina Martinelli

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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 Emma Matthews

Professor of Neurology and Consultant Neurologist

Professor Matthews is a Professor of Neurology at City St George’s University of London and Consultant Neurologist specialising in Neuromuscular disorders at St George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Her main academic interests are in genetic neuromuscular disorders. She has a particular focus on channelopathies and myotonic disorders including severe paediatric presentations and how neuromuscular disorders may contribute to the risk of sudden death.

Professor Francesca Morgante

Professor of Neurology

Dr Morgante's research is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms of Movement Disorders.

Dr Abteen Mostofi

Dr Camilla Neergaard Clark

Post-doc lecturer

Dr Neergaard Clark's research addresses how neurological disease disrupts social cognition and emotional behaviour.  She develops mechanistic, translational models that bridge cognitive theory, neural systems and clinically meaningful behaviour. During my PhD, I developed ecologically valid paradigms to interrogate how predictive processing, reward valuation and contextual integration shape social decision-making in frontotemporal dementia. As a NIHR Clinical Lecturer, she applied her approach to traumatic brain injury (TBI), integrating psychophysiology, hierarchical modelling and advanced neuroimaging to understand social dysfunction. Ultimately, her work aims to provide a mechanistic framework to improve patient profiling and the development of targeted interventions.

Dr Glenn Nielsen

Reader in Neurological Physiotherapy

Dr Nielsen’s research focuses on functional neurological disorder (FND), particularly the development and evaluation of rehabilitation interventions for functional motor and sensory symptoms. His work includes clinical trials, feasibility studies, complex intervention development, outcome measurement and implementation research, alongside experimental studies investigating the mechanisms of FND. He is also interested in movement disorders, including cervical dystonia and Parkinson’s disease, with a particular focus on physiotherapy and rehabilitation.

Professor Marios Papadopoulos

Professor of Neurosurgery

Professor Erlick Pereira

Professor of Neurosurgery

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.

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 Lucia Riccardi

Senior Lecturer in Neurology

Dr Ricciardi is a neurologist and clinical neuroscientist specialising in Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders. Her research focuses on understanding the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying non-motor symptoms, particularly cognitive, affective and autonomic symptoms. Her work combines neurophysiology, brain stimulation, autonomic measures and interoception research to investigate how brain–body interactions contribute to symptoms and their variability. She is particularly interested in translating these mechanistic insights into personalised, holistic approaches to improve care and outcomes for people with Parkinson’s disease'.

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 Samira Saadoun

Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience

Dr Steven Samuel

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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 Rahul Shah

Dr Shah's research focuses on neural mechanisms and biomarkers underlying chronic pain and movement disorders using invasive deep brain and spinal cord recordings.

Dr Hannah Thompson

Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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.

Professor David Williams

Professor of Psychology

Professor Williams' research focuses on developmental psychology and cognitive development, with a particular emphasis on neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism.  More specifically, his work seeks to understand how people monitor and evaluate their own thinking (metacognition), how they reason about other minds (mindreading), and how these processes shape everyday functioning. He is interested in the role of self-related cognition and memory processes, and how these may differ in neurodevelopmental conditions. His major current focus is on understanding the developmental links between autism and gender diversity.

Dr Kielan Yarrow

Reader in Psychology

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

Dr James Yearsley

Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Dr 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 Argyro Zoumprouli

Senior Lecturer in Neurointensive Care

Dr Zoumprouli is the Hayler Senior Lecturer in Neurointensive Care. Her research focuses on neurointensive care, neuroanaesthesia, patient safety and the development of safer, more reliable healthcare systems, focusing on improving outcomes for patients with spinal cord injury, subarachnoid haemorrhage, and other forms of acute brain and spinal cord injury requiring neurocritical care. Her interests include early physiological and neurological management, prevention and treatment of secondary injury, patient safety, human factors and quality improvement. She is particularly interested in translating evidence into reliable clinical practice, strengthening safety culture and improving multidisciplinary decision-making across the neurocritical care pathway.

Affiliate  Members

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.

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 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 Soo-Hyun Kim

Reader in Biomedical Sciences

Dr Kim is a distinguished researcher in human development and reproductive biology, with a particular focus on the fundamental molecular mechanisms driving these processes.

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.

Paul Jones

Emeritus Professor

Respiratory disease

Ursula Paredes

Lecturer

Evolutionary Psychology

Mohani Preet-Dhillon

Lecturer

Interdisciplinary Education and Research

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.