Anika Gogia

Using brain stimulation to understand how we adapt to a changing world

I am a research assistant in the Translational NeuroStimulation Laboratory, led by Professor Jacinta O'Shea, based at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA). My research uses non-invasive brain stimulation- transcranial ultrasound (TUS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)- alongside computational modelling of behaviour to investigate how the brain adjusts the rate at which it learns as the environment becomes more or less volatile, and whether shifting this adaptation influences repetitive negative thinking such as worry and rumination. This work is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

I hold a First Class BSc in Psychology from King's College London, where my final-year dissertation, supervised by Dr Caroline Catmur, used concurrent TMS-EEG to test the causal role of the right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC) in attentional orienting towards fearful faces. Before joining the group, I worked under Dr Joseph Kwon as a Dementia Research Intern in Health Economics at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, where I worked on care inequalities among older adults living with cognitive impairment, using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and the Healthy Cognitive Ageing Project (HCAP). I also worked on the SENSE study, a UCL and Birkbeck collaboration investigating sensory development in infancy, with Dr Tessel Bazelmans.