Pakita Van Puyenbroeck

Hi There! I'm a PhD candidate at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics, University of Zurich, where I study how social inference and multisensory processing differ in adolescents with autism. My early academic career so far has stretched across different fields within neuroscience, which characterizes my experience as a researcher as almost a mosaic of different angles to look at this complex system: our brain

My path into neuroscience started in Antwerp, where I studied Biomedical Sciences, and from the start of my studies, I had a deep interest in human behavior and how it differed in psychiatric disorders. This led me to a research internship in translational molecular psychiatry at the University of Zurich, where I worked on stem cell models of ADHD.

Because I had the opportunity to get to know how cool it was to create my own neuronal cells, I started my master’s thesis on organellar dynamics in neuronal models of Lowy Body Disorders at the University of Leuven.

However, I missed the connection from molecular neuroscience to real human behavior. This led me to change fields and move into the computational and psychophysiological side of human memory formation and decision-making at the University of Hamburg as a research assistant. Here, I did a study on how a change in pupil diameter can reveal something about how the brain decides what's worth remembering.

Now I am super excited to be doing my PhD, combining my prior interests in psychiatry with the field of human decision-making at the Center for Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich. I'm drawn to questions that sit between biology and behavior: How changes in social inference and sensory responsiveness interact, leading to the complex landscape of autism spectrum disorder.