People

Chris Bird: Principal Investigator

Chris has been using neuropsychology and fMRI to investigate memory and other cognitive processes since 2000. He joined the University of Sussex in 2011. Prior to this, Chris worked in the Neuropsychology Department at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and for nearly 10 years at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London. He is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Sussex and teaches Cognitive Psychology and FMRI to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Chris is a recipient of a 5-year European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and a 5-year ERC Consolidator Grant. He is a winner of the Elizabeth Warrington Prize from the British Neuropsychological Society and is an elected member of the Memory Disorders Research Society.

Email: Chris.Bird@sussex.ac.uk

Dominika Varga: Research Fellow

Dominika's research focuses on how we comprehend and remember real-life, complex experiences, especially those that are surprising or conflicting with our prior knowledge. She currently uses neuroimaging to investigate the neural underpinnings of detecting surprising occurrences and how those influence the way we segment our everyday lives into discrete events. Prior to joining the lab in 2020, she worked in Professor Beth Jefferies lab and completed an MSci in Psychology at the University of York.

Email: D.Varga@sussex.ac.uk

Flavia De Luca: Research Fellow

Flavia is interested in studying how humans understand and remember complex experiences. She completed her PhD at the University of Bologna. In her PhD she investigated how people remember past episodes; imagine future episodes, make future-based decisions and studying patients with focal brain lesions. During her PhD, she was also a visiting scholar at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL, where she focused on scene construction processes, studying patients with focal brain lesions and healthy individuals using structural MRI. Flavia moved to University of Sussex in October 2019 to work as a post-doc with Professor Chris Bird on the ERC funded EVENTS project. As part of her research, Flavia uses a combination of behavioural, neuropsychological and functional MRI techniques.

Email: F.De-Luca@sussex.ac.uk

Jessica Daly: Former PhD Student

Jessica was a PhD student in the School of Psychology who was supervised by Professor Chris Bird. Her research focused on understanding the relationship between APOE genotype (the largest genetic risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease) and memory. She used fMRI data and both standard and specialised tests of memory to investigate functional and behavioural differences due to APOE genotype across the lifespan. Her PhD was funded by a studentship from the Alzheimer's Society Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Sussex.

Email: J.Daly@sussex.ac.uk

Kasia Mojescik: PhD Student

Kasia is a PhD student funded by the Sussex Neuroscience programme. She is interested in the relationship between episodic memory, future thinking, and mental imagery, as well as how these phenomena are influenced by individual differences. During her PhD, she aims to investigate these cognitive abilities using neuroimaging and behavioural measures. Prior to joining the lab in 2022, she completed MSc in Software Development and MA in Psychology at the University of Glasgow. She was also an exchange student in Psychology at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Email: K.Mojescik@sussex.ac.uk

Atusa Saeipour: Research Assistant and PhD Student

Atusa is a research assistant and PhD student supervised by Prof Chris Bird. Atusa is interested in individual differences in the remembering of new events. Atusa completed their BSc and MSc in Psychology here at the University of Sussex and was awarded the Sussex Partnership Trust Prize for their MSc research project supervised by Prof Kate Cavanagh. Prior to joining the lab in Nov 2022 Atusa worked in mental health services and for Mind charity as an Independent Mental Health Advocate.

Email: A.J.Saeipour@sussex.ac.uk

Juliet O'Brien: Project Officer

Juliet shares her time between EVENTS and HONORLOGIC projects. Key responsibilities include developing internal and external communications, organising events and meetings, providing financial support, preparing reports, and organising recruitment. Juliet is also a member of the EDI and Race Equity Committee for the School of Psychology. She previously worked in the charity, hospice and housing sectors at a national and local level.

Email: juliet.obrien@sussex.ac.uk

Belle Rowney-Smith: Former MRes Student and Research Technician

Belle is a research technician and has recently completed her MRes Neuroscience, under the supervision of Prof Chris Bird. Her project used psychological measures and fMRI data to explore the relationship between empathy and episodic memory. As a research technician, Belle primarily focusses on memory recall data from the EVENTS project. Prior to her Master’s, Belle completed her BSc Medical Neuroscience undergraduate, also at Sussex.

Alumni

Sonia Domardzka: Former Research Assistant and Placement Student

Sonia was an undergraduate BSc Neuroscience student, doing a research placement at the Episodic Memory lab in 2022/2023. She conducted a summer research project under the supervision of Professor Chris Bird, which investigated how our predictions influence the formation of false memories about events. Sonia was also a part of the Neuroscience Society committee at the University of Sussex.

Alberto Mariola: Former Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Alberto’s research interests lie at the intersection of human perception, memory and metacognition. Specifically, he is interested in investigating the neural and computational mechanisms that underlie event segmentation and how this ability influences memory and reality monitoring. To do so, he employs a combination of naturalistic experimental paradigms (e.g., videos, XR technologies), neuroimaging (e.g., M/EEG combined with eye tracking) and computational modelling. Alberto completed an interdisciplinary MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience (Mind and Brain MSc; Track: Brain) at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain-Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and a BSc in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Trento. Alberto then completed his PhD in Neuroscience at the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science under the supervision of Prof Anil Seth, Dr Warrick Roseboom and Prof Luc Berthouze whilst being funded by the Sussex Neuroscience programme. Within the lab, he was working on a project assessing the relationship between event segmentation and recognition memory for naturalistic videos as well as working on the EVENTS project.

Petar Raykov: Former Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Petar is interested in how we rely on our previous experiences to understand and form memories of the world around us. He has used fMRI to examine how incoming information is integrated with previously acquired knowledge. Petar joined the University of Sussex in 2016 after completing his MSc in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Edinburgh. After his PhD, Petar was awarded a SeNSS post-doctoral fellowship on examining the effect of schema knowledge on new learning and then worked for the EVENTS project.

Sam Berens: Former PhD student and Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Sam is interested in developing computer models of brain function that explain how we are able to learn new information and recall past events. His previous work has focused on how we learn general patterns (1,2), new vocabulary (3), and the layout of unfamiliar places (4,5). He also has investigated what kinds of information are forgotten with time and why this happens (6). Sam uses a variety of research methods including computational modelling of behavioural and neuroimaging data.

Having completed a PhD and a 14-month post-doc with Prof Chris Bird, Sam moved to the University of York to work as a post-doc with Dr Aidan Horner. He since returned to Sussex to work on the ERC funded EVENTS project, before taking up a lectureship position within the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010566
[2] https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.22688
[3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.02.042
[4] https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01654
[5] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-020-00811-8
[6] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0888-8

Email: S.Berens@sussex.ac.uk

Gemma Campbell: Former PhD student and Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Gemma is interested in all aspects of learning and memory, particularly with regard to how these processes might change with abnormal cognitive ageing. Gemma originally joined the University of Sussex in 2009 and graduated with a degree in Psychology. She then completed an MSc in Clinical Neuroscience at UCL and has since returned to Sussex to start her PhD under the supervision of Chris Bird. Her research uses neuropsychological testing to investigate novel methods of learning in individuals with memory problems such as Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s disease.

James Keidel: Former Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Brain Imaging)

James received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied with Mark Seidenberg. He has since worked at the University of Manchester and Bangor University. His work has used fMRI (with a focus on multivariate analysis techniques) to investigate topics ranging from Shakespeare to semantics to bilingualism. He ran studies investigating memory function in typical populations as part of the TRANSMEM project.

Christiane Oedekoven: Former Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Neuropsychology)

Christiane is interested in cognitive ageing, especially regarding changes in memory processes with age. After studying Psychology, she received her PhD from the University of Marburg, investigating episodic memory in healthy elderly and patients with memory impairment using fMRI and neuropsychology. Since then, she worked at the University of Tuebingen, focusing on the effects of training and possible compensatory mechanisms. She was carrying out neuropsychological studies of episodic memory in individuals with memory problems as part of the TRANSMEM project.

Konstantinos Bromis: Former Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Konstantinos’s research interests focus on resting state functional connectivity, aiming to explore the intrinsic functional organization of the human brain and its role in cognition and disease. Konstantinos graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics. Since then, he completed an MSc in Neuroimaging at King’s College London and afterwards he received his PhD from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He was working on the investigation of functional connectivity patterns that may be altered during memory tasks as part of the TRANSMEM project.

Alice De Visscher: Former Visiting Scholar

Alice’s research interests focus on the typical and atypical development of numerical cognition. In particular, she studies the different types of dyscalculia (math learning disorders) using case and group studies. She started a PhD in the Numerical Cognition Lab of the UCL (Belgium) with Professor Marie-Pascale Noël and then joined the University of Sussex. Under the supervision of Chris Bird, Alice carried out an fMRI study on the brain regions associated with interference effects when recalling numerical facts. This was published in NeuroImage.