Rapuano awarded NSF GROW Fellowship

Kristina Rapuano, a PBS graduate student, was recently awarded a Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) fellowship from the National Science Foundation to conduct research with Morten Kringelbach at Aarhus University in Denmark.  The fellowship is awarded to active recipients of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program to enhance professional development through research at world-leading science institutions overseas.  Kristina’s research interest focuses on how the brain transforms sensory information from the external world into mental representations of hedonic pleasure.  She recently co-authored a commentary in the journal Brain (Kringelbach & Rapuano, 2016) highlighting the need to explore the temporal dynamics of brain network activity to better understand the neurobiology of reward and hedonic processing.  Her fellowship at Aarhus University with Dr. Kringelbach will afford Kristina an opportunity to apply her theoretical ideas in ways not possible at Dartmouth College.  Kristina plans to conduct research on reward using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a brain imaging technology that measures the magnetic fields associated with electrical signaling activity in the brain.  This technique is uniquely sensitive to temporal fluctuations in brain activity across multiple brain regions over time.  She will also have the opportunity to train in complex non-linear data analysis approaches pioneered in the Kringelbach lab. She will begin her six month fellowship this summer.