Marc Benhamou

I am a Ph. D. candidate under the supervision of Fabien Vinckier (and also an on-leave psychiatry resident).

Research project

Mood is a central psychological construct that interacts with most cognitive, affective and behavioral functions. In the field of psychiatry, so-called mood disorders are common and crippling conditions such as depression and bipolar disorder. They are thought to be primarily characterized by impaired mood regulation. However, our understanding of the functional and neural bases of mood remain poor, leaving chance and empirical trials the only sources of therapeutic advances for these conditions.  

The main purpose of my research project is to investigate mood fluctuations at the cognitive and neural levels, with a focus on their slow-kinetic character. To this end, we use experimental psychology and a smartphone app to collect mood data, sometimes jointly with fMRI or intracranial EEG to investigate their neural correlates. We do so in lab and ecological settings, at different timescales, in control and patient populations. We rely on computational modeling for a more thorough functional description, and as a way to link neural and cognitive levels together.

Background

I was trained in maths, physics and engineering at Télécom Paris (now part of Institut Polytechnique de Paris, graduated in 2015), and in medicine at Université Paris Descartes (now part of Université Paris Cité, graduated in 2019). I specialised in psychiatry with a residency at APHP / GHU Paris hospitals.

Contact

marc (dot) benh (at) gmail (dot) com