The School welcomes three new members of staff who joined the School in September 2015.
Dr Ian Charest
Dr Ian Charest is a cognitive neuroscientist generally interested in investigating high-level visual and auditory representations using neuroimaging techniques such as EEG, MEG and fMRI. He studies the neurobiological bases of individual differences in personality and behavior, with particular interests in human perception, memory, and decision-making. His work is centered on the question of how experience affects how our brains shape the world we see. He uses a combination of neuroimaging (fMRI), electrophysiological (EEG/MEG) and behavioural methods to understand the neural dynamics of representational idiosyncrasies.
Dr Charest took up his post as Lecturer in the School of Psychology in September 2015. He previously completed a career development fellowship at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC-CBSU), where he used neuroimaging to explore individual differences in brain representations of objects.
View Dr Charest’s staff profile
Dr Damian Cruse
Dr Cruse’s research aims to improve clinical practice following severe brain injury through the application of methods from cognitive electrophysiology. By identifying residual neural and cognitive mechanisms, it is possible to improve the accuracy of diagnoses and prognoses, and gain a more accurate understanding of how the brain supports consciousness and cognition.
Before starting his current position in the School of Psychology in September 2015, Dr Cruse was a post-doctoral fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Cambridge, UK) and a research scientist at The Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario (Canada) under the supervision of Professor Adrian M. Owen.
Dr Davinia Fernández-Espejo
Davinia Fernández-Espejo’s main research goal is to understand how the brain supports consciousness and what goes wrong for patients to become entirely unaware after severe brain injury. She uses techniques such as MRI (structural and functional), tDCS, and behavioural approaches in both healthy volunteers and patients with a disorder of consciousness to test hypotheses about the role of different brain structures in the clinical deficits they present. This research is directly translated into the development of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers to be used in clinical settings, as well as the development of novel treatment approaches.
After completing her PhD in 2010, she joined the University of Western Ontario (Canada) as a post-doctoral fellow, and subsequently a research scientist, at Professor Adrian Owen’s lab in the Brain and Mind Institute. She joined the School of Psychology in September 2015 as a Lecturer in Psychology.