Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence

I was appointed as the Professor of “Modeling of Cognitive Processes” at the Université Libre de Bruxelles for 2 academic years (2017-18 and 2018-19). This course dispensed an introduction to artificial neural networks to model cognitive and behavioral processes, for master students in cognitive science.

I have further mentored three cognitive science masters students during my PhD, both of which Myrtille Dewurlf and Florian Destoky are now performing PhD thesis at the Free University of Brussels.

As a Postdoctoral researcher I mentored Bart Aben during his PhD thesis, and supervised his work using fMRI. Bart is now working as a data scientist @ Philips in the Netherlands.

I am currently Co-advising the PhD thesis of Haopeng Chen with Prof. Tom Verguts @ Ghent University.

During my scientific career, I organized several national (Belgium) and international symposia. I organized two symposia on computational modeling of cognitive processes in Belgium during the annual meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS; Brussels 2017, Ghent 2018). Internationally, I organized a symposium entitled “Exploring decision-making through computational modeling” at the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP, 2019, Tenerife); Furthermore, with the Wim Gevers (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and Boris Burle (Université Aix-Marseille) I organized a conference on cognitive control and performance monitoring (CCPM, https://ccpm.sciencesconf.org/). I have been invited at the International Conference of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON, Amsterdam, 2017) in the symposium “Dilemmas in the face of uncertainty: Computational approaches to adaptive behavior” (other speakers: Bradley Love, UCL; Marieke Jepma, Leinden University; Thomas Goschke, TU Dresden). Moreover, I have given several international talks: Italy, invited by Prof. Giovanni Pezullo to the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome (Symposium on affordances); China, where I gave a keynote lecture at the PhD forum of Peking University (October, 2019), as well as at the School of Psychology, Shenzhen University (invited by Prof. Wu Yin); USA, where I gave a talk the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of Prof. Tali Sharot, as well as at Brown University in the labs of Prof. Matthew Nassar and Prof. Theresa Desrochers; Germany, where I was invited to give a talk at the Julich Institute of Neuroscience to give a talk on my latest work in recurrent neural networks for adaptive and flexible behavior. Finally, I would like to mention that I have thrived to communicate my research and knowledge in society. I founded the Brain & Beers social events (Belgium), an informal gathering open to the public for scientific dissemination, and recently I have participated as a volunteer mentor to the “Niñas Pro” program that aims at breaching the gender gap in STEM within Chile.