Lab Members

Lúcia Garrido, PI

I am very lucky to work with the people below.

Current Lab members

Rochelle Williams, PhD Student, 2021 - present

Rochelle completed a BSc in Psychology at City. University of London and also a MSc in Clinical, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience. Rochelle started her PhD in October 2021 and she is funded by a City PhD studentship. Rochelle's work looks at how representations of faces change with familiarity. She is also interested in how our own dispositions may influence how we perceive social traits in others.

Past Lab members

Anna Lvova, Research Assistant and MSc Student, 2021 - 2022

Anna was a student of the MSc in Clinical, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience at City, University of London, and she worked as an RA in the lab, and also conducted the research for her MSc dissertation in the lab. Anna's work was about trying to understand whether we experience the same emotions that we perceive in facial expressions of others, i.e., whether facial expressions of emotions are contagious or not.

Eveliina Salo, Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2020 - 2021

Eveliina was a student of the BSc in Psychology at City, University of London, and she worked as an RA in the lab. Eveliina was part of the PREP research programme at City and was also funded by a research grant from the Experimental Psychology Society.  Eveliina worked on a project about memorability of faces.

Olga Korolkova, Postdoctoral Researcher, 2018 - 2019

Olga is interested in face perception, facial expression categorisation, and multimodal person recognition. She graduated from Lomonosov University, Department of Psychology (Moscow, 2009), and completed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Vladimir Barabanschikov (Moscow, 2013). During her PhD, Olga compared categorical perception of morphed and realistic (human-posed) transitions between facial emotional expressions and developed a new stimuli set for that purpose. Later, she used the transient expressions obtained from a poser to explore the adaptation effect to static and dynamic faces and found that dynamic information in the face does not add to the adaptation bias previously found for static faces. Olga has also explored facial expression categorisation and adaptation using fMRI (in Ekaterina Pechenkova Lab, Moscow). Olga is currently investigating multimodal representations of people from faces and voices, using both fMRI and behavioural methods. She is funded by a Leverhulme Trust research grant.

Olga's website: https://sites.google.com/site/olgakurakova/en/home.

Maria Tsantani, PhD Student, 2015 - 2019

Maria completed a BA in Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology at the National and Kapodistran University of Athens. Maria then moved to the University of Glasgow to complete a psychology conversion-MSc in Psychological Studies and an MSc in Brain Imaging. Her MSc projects looked at perceived trustworthiness and dominance from voices. Maria started her PhD at Brunel in October of 2015, and she was funded by a Leverhulme Trust research grant. Maria investigated multisensory representations of person identity from faces and voices. Maria has now successfully passed her viva and has moved to a postdoc with Dr Richard Cook at Birkbeck, University of London.

Maria's website: https://sites.google.com/site/mariatsantani/home.

Anne-Marie Pitson, Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2019

Anne-Marie was a student of the BSc in Psychology at Brunel, and she worked as an RA in the lab. Anne-Marie was funded by a Brunel Widening Participation Internship. Anne-Marie worked on perception of social traits from faces and voices.

Sara Abdul-Hameed, Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2019

Sara was a student of the BSc in Psychology at Brunel, and she worked as an RA in the lab. Sara worked on a project investigating temperature changes in the face in response to emotions.

Natasha Baxter, Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2018

Natasha is a student of the BSc in Psychology at Brunel, and she has been working as an RA and Work Placement Student in the lab. Natasha is working on the project investigating temperature changes in the face in response to emotions.

Nadine Lavan, Postdoctoral Researcher, 2017

Nadine completed a BA in Linguistics, Phonetics and English Literature at University of Cologne in Germany before moving to London to do a masters in Speech, Language and Cognition at UCL. Nadine then did a PhD in Psychology at Royal Holloway, working with Dr Carolyn McGettigan. Nadine's research has focused on laughter processing, and on investigating the effect of familiarity on speaker recognition. She has been very interested in understanding how the variability in vocal signals affects perception of speaker characteristics. At Brunel, Nadine worked on a project looking at multisensory representations of person identity from faces and voices, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Nadine's website: https://nadinelavan.wordpress.com.

Andrew Phillips-Hird, Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2016 - 2017

Andrew was a student of the BSc in Psychology at Brunel, and he worked as an RA in the lab, analysing data from thermal images of faces. Andrew also did his final year dissertation in the lab.

Emily Mitson, Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2016 - 2017

Emily was a student of the BSc in Psychology at Brunel, and she worked as an RA in the lab, analysing data from thermal images of faces. 

Chiara Casella, Research Assistant, 2016

Chiara worked in the lab in the Spring and Summer of 2016, in a project funded by the Bial Foundation, looking at temperature changes in the face in response to emotions. Chiara is currently a PhD student at Cardiff University. 

Christine Girges, Postdoctoral Researcher, 2016

Christine did a BSc and a PhD in Psychology at Brunel University. She worked very briefly in the lab as a postdoc before moving to a postdoc at UCL.

Lisa Kuhn, PhD student (2013 - 2015) and Postdoctoral Researcher (2015)

Lisa did a PhD at Brunel University London (her primary supervisor was Professor Taeko Wydell). Her main project focused on comparing representations of emotion across faces and voices, both in adults and children. She then briefly worked in the lab as a postdoc, in a project funded by the Bial Foundation, before moving to a postdoc at University of Saarland.