ELENA MAINETTO | PhD
Elena obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Pisa (Italy) and her Master in Cognitive Neuroscience at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento (Italy). She completed her master thesis’s project in Raffaella Rumiati’s lab at Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Sudi Avanzati (SISSA, Trieste, Italy). After her studies, she worked as research assistant in Paul Fletcher’s lab at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge (UK). Both in Trieste and in Cambridge, she specialized in behavioral and neural mechanisms facilitating reward processing and decision making, using food as primary reward.
Elena is currently doing a PhD with Hanneke den Ouden and Roshan Cools at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, as part of the Language in Interaction consortium. Her research investigates the role of dopamine in inference for language and planning, using a combination of functional MRI, psychopharmacology and computational modeling in healthy human volunteers.