lab
Members of the Adaptive Learning (in) Psychology and Neuroscience (ALPN) Lab at the CHBH ðŸ§
Lei Zhang - Principal Investigator
I am an Associate Professor directing the Adaptive Learning Psychology & Neuroscience (ALPN) Lab, at the Centre for Human Brain Health and Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK.
Before joining Birmingham, I worked in the Gläscher Lab (PhD, summa cum laude, and 1-year postdoc) at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and I also worked as a Roche intern for Scientific Exchange (RiSE), based in the Clinical Computational Neuroscience Group at Roche Innovation Center Basel, Switzerland. I was then a Postdoc fellow in Social Decision Neuroscience at the SCAN-Unit, University of Vienna.
My research applies knowledge from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and computational modeling to gain a comprehensive understanding of how the brain computes values and social information when making decisions. For that, I use behavioral measurements, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and Bayesian hierarchical modeling.
Besides, I am deeply interested in Computational Psychiatry, to assess whether the same computational constructs preserve in psychiatric disorders, and how they might go awry at the neurocomputational level.
Gwynnevere Suter - PhD Student (Psychology)
I am a first-year Psychology PhD student funded by the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. My supervisors are Dr Emma Černis, Dr Lei Zhang, and Professor Ian Apperly. I plan to investigate reality monitoring ability and the associated metacognitive efficiency across dissociation’s subtypes and severity, considering how this can inform our characterisation of dissociation, our understanding of the relationship between dissociation and psychosis, and the distinctions used in dissociation research. The project will involve clinical and non-clinical samples, as well as employ cognitive, clinical, and functional neuroimaging techniques.
Prior to the PhD, I graduated with a first in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences (BA) from the University of Cambridge. During this, I collaborated with the Self and Body Lab (PI: Dr Jane Aspell) at Anglia Ruskin University, working on several research and public engagement projects.