About
Hello, I am Marina!
By occupation, I am a clinical neuroscientist who specializes in neuroimaging, aging and Alzheimer’s disease. In my PhD, I worked on resting-state EEG biomarkers of AD, and how these are related to cortical thinning. Being a Marie Curie fellow, I was very lucky to be able to visit other labs and research centers. Specifically, I got to spend time at the MarioNegri Institute in Milan, where I learned from Dr. Daniele Tolomeo about neuroimaging in small rodents (this led to a subproject on neuroanatomical trajectories in AD animal models). After that, I sneaked into the Computational Neuroimaging laboratory led by Prof. Mallar Chakravarty, where I spent the most invaluable time investigating the effects of deep brain stimulation on functional brain networks in AD mouse models (project interrupted by the COVID), and absorbing in fresh ideas. Through this experience, I learned a lot about methods for multimodal data fusion in neuroimaging, statistical modeling, and high-performance computing. Prior to that, I obtained my Master’s degree in interdisciplinary Neuroscience in Frankfurt am Main, where for my research project I focused on aberrant reward processing in neurodevelopmental conditions with fMRI, and later on got my first teaching experience at the University of Giessen. And further back, I was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, where I also earned my diploma in Clinical Psychology and got my interest in science, while recording eye movements in patients diagnosed on the schizophrenia spectrum.
I like R, FSL, ANTs, shell, computing on a cluster, reproducible open science practices, hierarchical random-effects models, sci-hub, and data-driven approaches. I am also greatly into learning new things and currently breaking my head over python and scikit-learn ML tools. In my future work, I want to investigate factors contributing to the heterogeneity of Alzheimer’s disease or other conditions related to pathological aging with data-driven approaches.
