Profile

I come from Romania and I moved to Oxford 2 years ago. I started salsa dancing a few years back and I like it so much that I end up doing steps when I’m waiting to cross the road. I joined the pistol club in Oxford when I moved here and I am now the Ladies Captain. After training on Sundays, we’re always having brunch together and talk about the latest show we saw on netflix. I like hanging out with my friends over ice cream and my favourite flavour is passion fruit. I also really like a good cup of tea, but whenever I make it, I forget about it and end up drinking it cold. My friends always tease me about it.

Dancing salsa

Pistol Shooting training

My work focuses on looking at pictures of people’s brains and figuring out what is different about them after they learnt a new movement. In order to take those pictures, I ask people to participate in my study and, if they want to, they get inside this big, noisy machine, called an MRI. This machine looks a lot like a doughnut 🍩 and the person’s head goes inside the hole of the doughnut. While the person is in there, the machine takes one picture of the person’s brain each second. What is fun about this is that the person also has a small box in their hand. The box has four buttons on it and people will press the buttons as they see them on a screen. Imagine that they are playing a short piano piece while being in the MRI.

With the pictures I get from the scanner, I can use these really smart computer programs that show me with brain areas are active when participants press the buttons. Then I can compare these patterns between before and after they learn the new movements and see what brain areas are important during the learning process.

In my work, there are two types of days. I have days when I am working with participants to my study and days when I am working with the pictures of their brains.

On participant days, I ask them to come to the lab in the morning. I explain them how the MRI machine (🍩) works and what they will have to do during the experiment. I have a laptop with me, so I ask them to practice the task on the laptop before they go into the machine. I also ask them to complete a safety questionnaire, because the MRI has a big magnet inside it, so you cannot enter that room if you have metal on you. If you had coins, all the coins would fly towards the magnet! After the scan finishes, I give them an iPad and I ask them to complete some tasks to test their memory and then they are good to go home.

On picture days, I pretty much stay at my desk all day in front of a big screen showing big pictures of brains. I write some computer programs that help me analyse what is similar and what is different between the pictures. This is how I can figure out what happens in the participants’ brains when they are learning the new movements.

I would like to organise an event opened to the general public to raise awareness about mental health problems and talk about the connection between mental health and art. Neuroscientists would come and talk about their research into mental health conditions and what they are doing to figure out what happens in people’s brains to cause them and what are potential ways to tackle them.  I would also like to invite scientists and artists to talk about the research that has been done on mental health conditions and creativity. Lastly, I would like to invite music and art therapists to talk about how music and art can help in dealing with mental health conditions.