News

• The ERC Synergy Grant holders meeting took place in Tübingen, Germany, this month. The first picture is from all our lab members together. The second picture includes the other labs from the grant, too. The following pictures include the dinner we shared, discussions during our meeting and trying out a set-up provided by the lab in Tübingen regarding furture stimuli.
  

• Our lab organised a farewell dinner for our visiting PhD student from Barcelona, Brenda Ryan
  

• Our lab members participating in a wall-sit challenge during a lab dinner at Peppe's place this April
  

• The ERC Synergy Grant holders meeting took place in Trier, Germany, this month
  

• Baichen and Peppe presented their posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, USA, in November
  

• Marta presented at the Neurobiology of Higher Cognitive Functions workshop in Erice, Italy in September
  

• The team all together in Maastricht
  

• Beatrice and Giuseppe went to the second plenary meeting of MINDSPACES: Art driven adaptive outdoors and indoors design in Athens. In the picture below, Peppe is explaining our lab research. To read more about MINDSPACES, click here.
  

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• Beatrice was awarded, together with two colleagues from Germany and Belgium, with the prestigious European Synergy Grant. This grant will suppport an ambitious research project focused on the investigation of how our brains process other people’s body language.It is the first time that an ERC Synergy Grant has been awarded to a researcher at Maastricht University (UM). Click here to read more information about it.

• What a better way to celebrate the good weather than enjoying a wonderful dinner together!

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• The 16th of May was an important day for the lab since two of our members successfully defended their dissertations: Tahnée Engelen with “Mapping the influence of social threat in the brain: from action observation to body ownership” while Minye Zhan with “The invisible body: The neural mechanisms of non-conscious and conscious processing of emotional bodies”. Congratulations to both of you!

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• Not everything is work! The lab recently enjoyed a wonderful dinner together.

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• Brain World magazine featured a past interview with the magazine regarding blindsight. For more information click here.
  
• Ai Koizumi has been selected to receive a Poster Award for the Social & Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) conference, which will take place in New York in May. The poster presents a high-quality study regarding the connectivity between V1 and putamen during subconscious emotional processing. This study is a collaboration between the Brain and Emotion lab and CiNet (Japan).
• Beatrice will be giving a talk titled "A bottom-up perspective on embodiment" at the Brain and Body workshop held by the Human Brain Project in Barcelona. For more information click here.
  
• The work developed by Emmanuel Van der Auwera during his residency at the Brain and Emotion lab with Beatrice de Gelder will be exhibited during the opening of the Gluon Foundation on Thursday 1st of March in Brussels (Gluon Foundation, Slachthuisstraat, 4-6, 1000, Brussels). For more information click here or here.
  
• The study on the use of VR to treat domestic violence offenders has been featured in the tabloid newspaper Daily Mirror. This study is a collaboration between the University of Barcelona and the Brain and Emotion lab. To read the article, pease click here.
  

• Beatrice was interviewed by the on-line magazine Conceptual Fine Arts about her interest in art and how she links it to her work as a cognitive neuroscientist. To read the interview, please click here .
• “Drawing in the New Machine Age” is an exciting event where artist Amelie Bouvier and brain scientist and manga artist Minye Zhan will engage in a conversation about drawing as an essential tool for artists and scientists. Professor Beatrice de Gelder will moderate this event that will take place in Brussels (46 Rue Jean d’Ardennestraat) on the 3rd of February at 3pm. For more information click here .

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• Kiki successfully defended her dissertation “The neural basis of sound location processing in humans” on October 12th. Congratulations!

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• Beatrice was invited to talk about AI and Neuroscience at the Ars Electronica 2017.

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• Sunday Times dedicated an article to our research on the relationship between emotional body language and race. Click here to read the article.

• Tahnée presented her poster in SFN 2016. Bea's new book was show-cased at the OUP booth.

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• Bea was interviewed by the Spanish magazine Muy Interesante. Click here for the interview (in Spanish).
• Bea gave a talk in the Spanish program "brilliant minds" on October 13th. Click here for the schedule.
• Charlotte is participating the BIP2016 - BIENNIAL OF THE POSSIBLE IMAGE with a video "Perdu à Pepinster", shot with the lab members during a trip together. The expo runs from 20 August to 16 October. See the link above for details.

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• Ruud successfully defensed his dissertation “Sympathy for the Devil - On the Neural Mechanisms of Threat and Distress Reactivity” on 13 April. Committee members included Prof. Frans de Waal, Prof. Mel Slater, Prof. Alex Sack, Prof. Rene Hurlemann, Prof. Mavi Sánchez-Vives, Prof. John Rijsman. He received his PhD Cum Laude. Congratulations!
• Ruud’s dissertation was featured in several media outlets, such as De Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper) and Radio 1 (Dutch public news radio). Click here for a complete overview.
  

• The young and relieved Dr. Hortensius talking to Mel Slater, Mavi Sánchez-Vives and Beatrice de Gelder.
• Sofía Seinfeld (PhD student) from Barcelona University is visiting our lab to perform a study about virtual reality.

• The seminar "When Art Meets Science" 2016 arranged by Maastricht University and the Jazz Maastricht foundation will take place on March 19th. See here for the scheduled talks.
• "Do You Speak Synergy", an exhibition of works from 4 contemporary artists, is on show from Feb 26th to Apr 2nd, in collaboration with Bea. Click here to see detailed information.
• Bea is interviewed by the UM magazine. Click here to read the interview.

• Bea's new book is published: Emotions and the body. Click here to see the details and how to order.

• Visual artist Charlotte Lagro is staying in the Brain and Emotion Lab as an artist-in-residence. She is developing an interactive video work, inspired by the methodologies and experiments created and conducted by the researchers in the Lab. Unlike other works she has done before, the moment of the screening will become part of the creation of the video. Similar to the experiments of the researchers, the observer of the video is a participant or a subject instead of an anonymous viewer. Currently the work of Charlotte Lagro can be seen at CIAP in Hasselt (Be), until 28 February. More info: www.ciap.be. More info about Charlotte Lagro: www.charlottelagro.com
  
• With members of the lab contributing photos of body postures, we've made our lab mugs.

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• Ruud’s thesis entitled "Sympathy for the Devil - On the Neural Mechanisms of Threat and Distress Reactivity” was approved and he will defend it on 13 April, 14.15 at Tilburg University. More info will be available soon.
• Bea is visiting the University of Cape Town.

• Bea enjoying the weather and the beach with Ruud.

• The lab holding a skype meeting across Maastricht, Cape Town and Georgetown.

• Ruud received the Van der Gaag Grant of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for a research project at the Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health, University of Cape Town.
• Lisanne and Mehrdad completed their PhD studies and defended their thesis successfully. Lisanne defended her thesis “From individual to crowd perception: How motions and emotions influence the perception of identity, social interactions, and bodily muscle activations” on 18 November 2015, 14.15 at Tilburg University, and received her PhD degree cum laude. Follow this link for more information.
Mehrdad defended his thesis and received his PhD degree at Maastricht University on 30 October at 14.00. This thesis is titled “Behind the seen: unconscious perception of objects, faces and emotions”.
• Bea gave a talk in the conference "The Science of Beauty" November 10th at The Royal Society of Edinburgh. See here for the full program.
• The symposium "CREATION AT THE NEXUS OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND ART" was held in Venice, on November 3/4 2015. Click here for the detailed program.

• Primatologist Frans de Waal visited the lab on November 2nd.

• Aline explaining her virtual reality study to Frans de Waal.

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• The lab enjoying the recent spree of success with champagne
• Bea presented work from the lab at the European Brain and Behaviour Society & European Behavioural Pharmacology Society meeting in Verona.

• Kiki is visiting the lab of Prof. Josef Rauschecker at Georgetown University to work on a project on spatial localization of complex sounds in sighted and early blind humans. This exchange is funded by the Erasmus Mundus Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Student Exchange Network.
• Lisanne (Elisabeth) received an Erasmus+ grant to visit the Porto Interactive Centre (PIC) lab at the University of Porto, led by prof. Veronica Orvalho. The project entailed the measurement of EMG and motion capture of emotional body language simultaneously.
• Ruud received an Erasmus+ grant to visit The Experimental Virtual Environments (EVENT) Lab for Neuroscience and Technology led by Prof. Mel Slater and Prof. Mavi Sánchez-Vives at the University of Barcelona. He worked on an Immersive Virtual Reality project. Link: http://www.event-lab.org/
  

• Bea and Lisanne appeared on the Dutch tv show ‘De Kennis Van Nu’ hosted by Astronaut André Kuipers to talk about prosopagnosia. Lisanne was also interviewed for a radio show that accompanied the tv episode. See Videos for details.

• The tv crew of ‘De kennis van nu’ visiting the lab

• Beatrice and Salvatore discussing art and science at the yearly TEFAF meeting

• Bea at the presentation of the DANCE grant
• The lab presented 5 posters at the OHBM ’15 meeting in Honolulu. Great conference and good times!

• Minye and Rebecca preparing their poster presentations.

• Ruud discussing his poster with Julie Grèzes and others at SfN ’14.

• Minye demonstrating the Oculus Rift to Ruud.

• Beatrice was invited to talk about unconscious vision in a Spanish Television. Click here to watch the video (in Spanish).
• Lisanne Huis in ‘t Veld won a poster price at EPOS conference, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Click here to view the poster.
• Lisanne Huis in ‘t Veld was interviewed by FunX Radio on face blindness (in Dutch). Click here to listen.

• Marco Tamietto received a VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). This will give him the opportunity to develop and extend his own line of research and start his own research group. The project deals with understanding emotions in the real world. “In everyday life emotions are influenced by the physical and social context in which they occur. This project will investigate how the human brain integrates emotional and contextual information to rapidly extract the global meaning of the situation.”
• Beatrice and Lisanne Huis in ‘t Veld were interviewed for an Dutch newspaper article on prosopagnosia. Read it here.
• Multiple papers were published or accepted in the recent months. A paper using DTI to investigate subcortical connections to human amygdala and their changes following destruction of the visual is published in Current Biology. A study investigating the constructive nature of affective vision has been published in Plos One. Visit the publications section to read the full text version of the articles.

• Beatrice was invited for Neuromagic 2012 together with other neuroscientist and famous magicians like James Randi and Apollo Robbins. An article on the meeting was published in the Scientific American, click here to read the article.

• Several papers have been published in a wide variety of journals including Neurology, Cortex and PLoS ONE. Click here for the full list.
• Bernard Stienen and Charlotte Sinke received their PhD after successfully defending their thesis titled “The processing of bodily and facial expression with and without visual awareness” and “Perception of emotions from faces and bodies and the influence of context“ respectively. On the day of this defense, Bernard organized a symposium together with Marco Tamietto, Ruud Hortensius and Beatrice on the non-conscious mind, click here for more information.

• Amazing news: Beatrice de Gelder has received the ERC Advanced Grant!!! More info will be posted soon!
• Article in press in the Journal of Neuroscience by Beatrice and Bernard Stienen together with Matteo Candidi and Salvator Aglioti, on event-related repetitive TMS and detection of threatening human body postural changes.
• The website of Brain and Emotion Laboratory Leuven is online. Please visit their website. Also, Jan moved to BELL.

• Bernard Stienen has joined the group of Fiona Newell as a post-doc. Good luck in Dublin!
• A productive time for the lab with papers in PNAS, PLoS ONE (2), and Emotion. See the publications section for full versions of the articles.

• The cover for the new book op Beatrice de Gelder has been released. More details will be revealed soon.
• The episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman featuring Beatrice de Gelder and the lab was broadcasted on US television on July 6th. You can watch the episode online and below.

• A correspondence was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (de Gelder, van Honk, Tamietto) and a research article in Cerebral Cortex (Pichon, de Gelder & Grèzes).
• Mariska Kret successfully defended her PhD-thesis! Congratulations to dr. Kret! We wish her good luck in Japan! At the moment she is working at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University.

• A correspondence was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (de Gelder & Tamietto), a research article co-authored by Beatrice de Gelder and Akihiro Tanaka in Experimental Brain Research, and an article in Nature Neuroscience also co-authored by Beatrice de Gelder.
• An article in the German version of Scientific American, Gehirn&Geist, is published. It is a translation of the original 2010 article in Scientific American by Beatrice de Gelder. Also, a Japanese translation is published.

• Watch us soon on the Science Channel! The lab will star in an episode of the second season of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. The episode entitled Is there a sixth sense? will be broadcasted in the US on July 6th (10pm e/p) on the Science Channel. Click here for more information.