Blakemore Lab

People


Faculty

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. She is Leader of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group at the ICN and her research focuses on social cognition in adolescence and in autism spectrum disorders.

Sarah-Jayne studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University (1993-1996) and then did her PhD (1996-2000) at the Functional Imaging Lab (FIL) with Chris Frith and Daniel Wolpert, investigating the self-monitoring of action in healthy individuals and people with schizophrenia. She then took up a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship (2001-2003) to work in Lyon, France, with Jean Decety on the perception of causality in the human brain. This was followed by a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (2004-2007) at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL.

Sarah-Jayne is actively involved in Public Engagement with Science: she frequently gives public lectures and talks at schools, has worked with the Select Committee for Education, acted as scientific consultant on the BBC series The Human Mind in 2003, and co-authored a book with Professor Uta Frith called The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education.

Sarah-Jayne is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust Four Year PhD Programme in Neuroscience at UCL. She is Associate Editor for Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and Social Neuroscience. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of the new journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Click here for Curriculum Vitae.

email: s.blakemore @ ucl.ac.uk

 

Post-Doctoral Research Fellows

Guillaume Barbalat

Guillaume Barbalat is a psychiatrist who works in Lyon, France. He completed his PhD on neuroscience, investigating the neural substrates of decision-making processes in diverse populations including patients with schizophrenic, children with dyslexia, addict subjects and typically developing adolescents. His research has involved using tecniques such as fMRI, information theory and sequential sampling models. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he will study social cognition in patients with schizophrenia and in typically developing adolescents in the Blakemore lab.

 

Kathrin Cohen Kadosh

Kathrin Cohen Kadosh's research focuses on the emergence of (social) cognitive abilities in the typical and atypically developing human brain from early childhood through adulthood, using a variety of neuroimaging methods, such as ERP, fMRI, and TMS in combination with behavioural methods. In particular, she has been working on pinpointing the developmental trajectories underlying the cortical specialization for face processing and how these map onto the corresponding increases in processing proficiency. Lately, she has also become interested in the changing neural patterns of functional and effective connectivity across the developmental span, using dynamic causal modeling methods.


Iroise Dumontheil

Dr Iroise Dumontheil did her degree in Biology at the ENS Cachan and University of Paris XI, followed by a Masters in Cognitive Sciences at University of Paris VI. Her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, entitled "Rostral Prefrontal Cortex and Control of Attention", was awarded by the University of Paris VI, and was supervised by Prof. Alain Berthoz, from the College de France (Paris) and Prof. Paul Burgess, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. She recently spent a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Fyssen Fundation to work with Prof. John Duncan at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. She is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the ICN, working with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore on the development of rostral prefrontal cortex, using both behavioural and functional/structural neuroimaging methods.

email: i.dumontheil@ucl.ac.uk




PhD students

Stephanie Burnett

Stephanie Burnett completed a degree in Psychology and Physiology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. During that time she worked part-time at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics with Jonathan Flint and at a residential centre for autistic adults, and also did an undergraduate research project with Edmund Rolls. She was then accepted on to the Wellcome Trust four year programme in Neuroscience at UCL. Stephanie is currently doing a PhD with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Chris Frith looking at social cognition and its neural correlates in adolescence.

e-mail: s.burnett@ucl.ac.uk

 

Jennifer Cook

Jennifer Cook studied Psychology at Bath University. During this time she did a year-long placement at Oxford University in which she investigated the neural correlates of slot machine gambling.  Jennifer is currently on the Wellcome Trust four year programme in Neuroscience at UCL under the supervision of Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. She is investigating action observation in typically developing adolescents and in ASC.

e-mail: jennifer.cook@ucl.ac.uk

 

Hauke Hillebrandt

Hauke Hillebrandt majored in 'Integrated Social and Cognitive Psychology' at Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany and also studied abroad at UCL. He will do a PhD with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore investigating stereotypes and prejudice during adolescence.

e-mail: hauke.hillebrandt@gmail.com


Catherine Sebastian

Catherine Sebastian studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, and stayed on to do an MSc in Neuroscience. While there, she worked on a number of projects related to developmental disord ers including an ERP study on dyslexia, and investigation of face processing abilities in the relatives of people with autism. Catherine is doing a PhD with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Essi Viding investigating self-reference and self-awareness in typically developing adolescence, and in high-functioning adolescents on the autistic spectrum.

e-mail: c.sebastian@ucl.ac.uk

 


Interns and project students


Olivia Küster

Olivia Küster is studying Psychology at University of Konstanz, Germany. She is currently doing a six month internship in the Blakemore Lab, working on a project with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Iroise Dumontheil on mentalising in adults and adolescents.


Anne-Lise Goddings

Dr Anne-Lise Goddings is a paediatrician working on a research project on brain development during puberty in collaboration with project with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Dr Russell Viner at the Institute of Child Health.

Recent alumni

Dr Zillah Boraston Wellcome Trust PhD student 2004-2008 Scientific Officer at DEFRA
Dr Niall Boyce Medical Elective, 200

Psychiatrist

Susana Calo
Intern student, 2004-2005 PhD student at BBSU, ICH, UCL

Ana Seara Cardoso
Intern student, 2008
PhD student at UCL Dept of Psychology

Dr Suparna Choudhury MRC PhD student 2003-2006 Research fellow at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany
Emily Jacobs

Intern student, 2003 Graduate student at UC Berkeley, USA
Ben de Haas Intern student, 2008 Wellcome Trust four year PhD programme in Neuroscience at UCL
Bano Hassan

MSc student, 2007-2008 Research Assistant, ICH
Hanneke den Ouden

Erasmus student, 2003-2004 Post-doc at Radboud University Nijmegen
Isobel Pastor-Bristow Wellcome Trust summer student, 2004 Civil Service Fast Track
Rachael HoultonWellcome Trust four year PhD student lab project 2008Wellcome Trust four year PhD programme in Neuroscience at UCL
Rachel Swain Wellcome Trust summer student, 2008 Cambridge University, Natural Sciences, 3rd Year
Teresa Tavassol

Intern student, 2003

Graduate student at Autism Research Centre, Cambridge
Dr Stephanie Thompson BBSRC PhD student 2004-2007 Gap year


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