During the on-line Wintermeeting of the Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences on Feb. 4th 2021, “our” Joana Carvalho has won the “best thesis of the year award” for her PhD thesis “Plasticity of Cortical Visual Field Representations” which she defended last year. The award goes to the thesis that best represents the values of the school like “team work, multi- and interdiscplinarity and innovativeness” and that had a large input of the student themselves. No shortage of any of that, is what the jury concluded. Congratulations!
Joana is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, working in the Shemesh preclinical MRI lab.
The “pièce de la resistance” of Joana’s thesis: Micro-Probing, a new high-resolution way to characterize population Receptive Fields in the visual cortex. Top depicts the conventional way of doing this. Figure by co-author Michael Hoffmann.