TRAVEL SCHOLARS
Laramie Duncan

Dr. Duncan trained in Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology at the University of Colorado and completed her clinical internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.  Her interest in understanding disorders such as schizophrenia from the human to biological levels lead to postdoctoral research in statistical genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she lead genomic analysis for two international research consortia, focused on PTSD and Anorexia. Ongoing work includes computational comparisons of the patterns of genetic influence on diverse phenotypes, and clinical work in the INSPIRE clinic for early psychosis. She is currently a clinical postdoc and will start as faculty at Stanford in 2017.
Beate Herbert

I am Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. I studied Psychology at the University of Eichstaett and completed my PhD thesis in psychology  at the University of Munich (LMU). I received my “Venia Legendi” in Psychology at the University of Tuebingen. I was Assistant Professor at the Central Institute of Mental Health and Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the University of Tübingen, and Term Professor at the University of Bamberg. Until March 2016 I was Guest Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Tuebingen. I am associate member of Health Psychology at the University of Ulm, as well as of the “Emotion Regulation Lab” at the VU Amsterdam, NL, and at Dr. Nancy Zucker’s Lab at the Duke University, USA.

Some relevant areas of my research are: Neurobiological and psychophysiological mechanisms of interoception, multimodal interoception and multisensory integration, alexithymia, “embodied cognition”, eating behavior, eating disorders, obesity, emotion regulation, and stress “resilience".
Sarah Garfinkel

Sarah Garfinkel completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex, England. She then underwent a postdoctoral training fellowship in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, specializing in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She currently works at the University of Sussex in the laboratory of Hugo Critchley. Her research focuses on brain-body interactions underlying emotion and memory, with a particular interest in heart modulation of fear processing and fear memory.  In addition, she also investigates how interoceptive deficits may contribute to alterations in emotion processing in a variety of clinical conditions. 
Nasir Naqvi

Dr. Naqvi’s is an addiction psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist whose research combines functional MRI and clinical methods in order to examine the neural mechanisms by which treatments for alcohol use disorder change in drinking behavior.  In particular, Dr. Naqvi is interested in the role of neural systems for emotion regulation, interoception and risky decision making in behavioral treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Enhancement and disulfiram (Antabuse).  As a doctoral student working with Antoine Bechara, Dr. Naqvi discovered the role of the insula in addictive behavior by showing that cigarette smokers who sustain damage in this region are able to quit smoking easily, immediately, without relapsing and without craving.  The insula continues to be an area of interest for Dr. Naqvi, specifically as it functions in decisions to use substances despite significant risks.
Neil Harrison

Dr Harrison is Reader in Neuropsychiatry and Head of the Immunopsychiatry Group at Brighton & Sussex Medical School, UK. He completed a Neuroscience PhD at UCL, and psychiatry training at the Maudsley and National Hospital, Queen Square. His research investigates how systemic inflammation interacts with the brain to modulate mood, motivation and cognition and contributes to common mental illnesses such as depression, CFS and Alzheimer's. 

Klaas Stephan

Klaas Enno Stephan is Professor at the University of Zurich & ETH Zurich and Founding Director of the Translational Neuromodeling Unit (TNU), Zurich.  Integrating computational scientists and clinicians under one roof, the mission of the TNU is to develop and validate mathematical models for inferring subject-specific mechanisms of brain disease from non-invasive measures of behaviour and brain activity.  Following doctoral degrees in Medicine and Neuroinformatics, Klaas’ scientific track record includes the construction of the connectivity database CoCoMac, development of various neuroinformatics tools and computational modeling techniques (e.g., ORT, nonlinear DCM, RFX-BMS), and numerous studies of brain connectivity in health and disease.  In addition to his work at Zurich, he is Honorary Principal at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, London, and External Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, Cologne.  His work has been recognized by several awards and honours, including the Wiley Young Investigator Award for Human Brain Mapping and election to the Max-Planck-Society.
Fadel Zeidan

Dr. Zeidan is an assistant professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy and associate director of neuroscience research for the Center for Integrative Medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Dr. Zeidan's programmatic line of research is focused on determining the neural mechanisms that mediate the relationship between self-regulatory practices and pain.  He is especially interested in determining if and how mindfulness-based mental training regimens affect pain and self-referential processing.  He is currently conducting studies to examine the effects of mindfulness meditation on a spectrum of chronic pain outcomes.  Dr. Zeidan is currently a K99/R00 scholar and was awarded the 2014 Mitchell Max Award for Research Excellence by the National Institutes of Health for his work on mindfulness meditation and pain.
TRAVEL AWARDEES
Vivien Ainley

​After a first degree was in Economics and a twenty year career in secondary school leadership, I was fortunate in having the opportunity to change direction and pursue my lifelong fascination with cognitive psychology. Following an MSc in Human Neuroscience at Royal Holloway University of London, I recently completed my PhD, supervised by Prof Manos Tsakiris. My research, in the Lab of Action and Body at Royal Holloway, continues to be concerned with the crucial contribution that interoception makes to the multisensory/ sensorimotor integration that underpins the sense of self. Specifically I am interested in the links between interoceptive and exteroceptive self-processing; and the contribution that interoceptive sensation may make in the domain of action, such as in automatic imitation and the sense of agency. Growing out of the debate about how best to characterise and measure the various aspects of what is known as ‘interoceptive awareness’, I have recently developed a predictive coding model of ‘interoceptive accuracy’ which characterises IAcc in terms of ‘precision’ in interoceptive systems and attempts to provide a novel theoretical explanation of major research findings.
Indira Garcia Cordero

​Indira García Cordero obtained her Degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires in 2014. She is conducting her Ph.D. research in the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience (at the Institute of Translational and Cognitive Neuroscience) based on neuroimaging analysis of functional and structural networks associated with behavioral deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders. She is currently working in a study aimed to specify neurofunctional links between interoceptive processes and metacognition and characterized the integrative role of the insular cortex and its networks in pathological populations.
In the future, she would like to focus on physiological interoceptive mechanisms as a key to assess the study of emotions and feelings. Moreover, she would like to explore how the physiopathology underneath neuropsychiatric diseases could impact on functional connectivity and emotional behavior.
Megan Klabunde

​Megan Klabunde Ph.D. is an Instructor within the Department of Psychiatry’s Division of Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Klabunde’s research focuses on examining the neurodevelopment of interoceptive processing and its role in emotion regulation, the theory of mind and the development of symptoms across psychiatric disorders. She uses functional neuroimaging to examine interoceptive processing in typically developing youth in addition to children and adolescents with neurogenetic syndromes or psychiatric disorders. Dr. Klabunde is also interested in better understanding how genes, sex, puberty, stress and early life interactions influence interoceptive development.
​Christiane Pané-Farré

Christiane Pané-Farré, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral researcher under mentorship of Alfons Hamm at the Department of Physiological and Clinical Psychology / Psychotherapy at the University of Greifswald, Germany. She earned her Psychology Diploma in 2002 and her doctoral degree (Psychology) in 2009 at the University of Greifswald. Since 2011 she is a licensed psychotherapist (CBT).  As a visiting researcher Christiane joined the Laboratory for Behavioral Medicine at the Department of Psychiatry, Standford University working with Walton T. Roth and Craig B. Taylor. Recently, she worked with Michelle Craske at the Anxiety Disorders Research Center at UCLA. Funded by the German Research Society, the German Ministry of Education and Research, and a University Junior Research Group grant her research is focused on the edge of clinical psychology and psychophysiology. She is interested in understanding the etiology of anxiety and pain disorders specifically focusing on defensive mobilization to interoceptive threat. Also, her research is targeted at elucidating the development of psychopathology after initial panic attacks as well as possibilities and correlates of targeted early interventions. 
Christoph Benke

​Christoph Benke is a graduate student under mentorship of Christiane Pané-Farré and Alfons Hamm at the Department of Physiological and Clinical Psychology / Psychotherapy at the University of Greifswald, Germany. After graduating from the University of Greifswald in 2013 with a Psychology Diploma, he received a Ph.D. fellowship by the postgraduate scholarship program of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. In addition to his research, he started a postgraduate training in clinical psychology and psychotherapy (CBT) and a clinical psychology externship at the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Clinic at the University Medicine Greifswald. He is primarily interested in understanding the underlying processes and mechanisms of the interplay between interoception and anxiety. His work focuses on modulatory factors that might affect the defensive mobilization to feared interoceptive sensations. As such, he is interested in applying new experimental designs to investigate a wide range of possible determinants of defensive responses to interoceptive threat as they pertain to the maintenance or development of psychopathology.
Aaron Heller

​I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Miami. My background spans clinical psychology, affective neuroscience and developmental neuroscience across the life span. I have specific training and expertise in neuroimaging, endocrine systems, peripheral physiology and approaches to study real-world functioning using technology (mHealth) such as Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA). I received my PhD at the University of Wisconsin with Richie Davidson and Ned Kalin. A core feature of my research is characterizing associations between individual differences in affective and neural dynamics and how they relate to real world functioning to better characterize psychological health and resilience. 
Juliet Kroll

​Juliet Kroll is a 3rd year doctoral student in the clinical psychology program at Southern Methodist University. Her research interests broadly include psychoneuroimmunology and the role of stress and depression in chronic disease. Prior to her graduate studies at SMU, Juliet worked at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and earned BA degrees in biology and psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. 
Frederike Petzschner

​Dr. Frederike Petzschner (born 1986) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Translational Neuromodeling Unit (TNU) at ETH & University of Zürich. Before coming to Zurich, Frederike obtained a Master of Honors degree in Physics, followed by a PhD in Neuroscience at the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Munich. Her work centers around perception and decision making in health and disease – using a combination of mathematical modeling and imaging methods (EEG, fMRI). Currently Frederike focuses on developing new quantitative tests and mechanistic models to assess the processing of interoceptive prediction errors with respect to our own heartbeat.
Laura Berner

​Dr. Laura A. Berner is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, San Diego Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research. Her program of research aims to identify brain-based factors that contribute to eating disorders and to inform the development of novel treatments that directly target these factors. Dr. Berner earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she used novel animal models to test pharmacological interventions for binge eating. Building directly upon this preclinical research, her graduate research at Drexel University examined self-regulatory control and neural correlates of loss-of-control (LOC) eating in anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and obesity. Results from Dr. Berner’s NIMH fellowship-funded dissertation identified altered prefrontal cortical activation associated with pronounced eating-specific inhibitory control deficits in bulimia nervosa. In her current fellowship, under the mentorship of Dr. Walter Kaye, she uses functional magnetic resonance imaging and neurocognitive tasks to study individuals ill with and recovered from eating disorders. Her primary work, funded by an NIMH NRSA fellowship and the Hilda and Preston Davis Foundation, focuses on emotion regulation, motor inhibition, and goal-directed action control over habit-based responses in women with bulimia nervosa. In addition, she is analyzing data from a breathing restriction task to examine the neural correlates of aversive interoception in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Her next steps will investigate interactions between interoception and inhibitory and affective control in eating disorders.
Thomas Kraynak

​Thomas Kraynak is a Graduate Research Fellow in the Biological & Health Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, with training support provided by the NHLBI Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Research Training Program. Working with Peter Gianaros, PhD, and Anna Marsland, PhD, Thomas is broadly interested in the brain-body pathways that link psychological stress, affect, and health across the lifespan. Specifically, he studies the contribution of inflammatory pathways and baroreflex mechanisms to brain function, stress reactivity, and cardiovascular health. Thomas is also involved in the Graduate Training Program at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Pittsburgh.
Kyle Logie-Hagen

​Kyle started a PhD in Psychology at the University of Toronto this fall and is working under the supervision of Dr. Norman Farb. Kyle has experience in meditation techniques and is interested in studying interoception as it relates to contemplative practices as well as mental and physical health for his doctoral studies.  He recently completed a MSc in Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal where he studied the emotional processing of auditory stimuli, such as music and human vocalizations, using Magnetoecephalogaphy. Kyle completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario where he was involved with mindfulness meditation research. 
Adrian Yoris

Lic. Adrian E. Yoris specializes in neurosciences Anxiety disorders. Currently, he serves as a member of the executive committee (CD) of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Translational (CONICET). He is also a PhD Fellow of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (Argentina). In addition, he is an Assistant Professor (Favaloro University, Argentina).
Lic. Yoris was speaker at conferences as IBRO 2015 (Rio de Janeiro) and national congresses.
Area of interest: ​​interoception and anxiety disorders.