Projects
Scientific support fund: Universal Compassion and Prosociality: An Interdisciplinary Project on the Variation and Cultivation of Universal Compassion and Its Relationship to Social Emotions, Prejudice and Prosocial Behavior in Youth (VOPPU95) Vrije Universiteit Brussel
challenge to develop cooperative social relationships within groups
and, especially in increasingly diverse societies, between groups.
Scientific research on meditation- and mindfulness-based mental
training interventions has grown and has shown positive effects on
both well-being and prosocial behavior. However, little research
exists that ...
Towards an integrative model of spoken and written word processing in the intact brain and its decline in primary progressive aphasia and neurodegenerative disease KU Leuven
Molecular and functional imaging as a pivotal tool for translational medicine in the field of neuroscience and oncology: a platform creating a bridge between basic research, clinical development and industrial application. KU Leuven
Characterization of short- and long-distance neuronal circuits in the enteric nervous system and their specific defects in Hirschsprung’s disease using advanced microscopy and stem cell technology KU Leuven
A distinguishing feature of the gastrointestinal (GI) system is the presence of the enteric nervous system (ENS), a mesh-like network of neurons and glia. The ENS mainly controls GI motility, secretion and local blood flow. During development, vagal neural crest cells enter and migrate down the gut to colonize the intestinal tube and form the ENS. As these neural progenitors have the daunting task of traveling long distances and bridging ...
Cause-effect relationships between brain networks and inter-limb coordination in older adults and the effect of oscillating transcranial brain stimulation on training-induced neuroplastic changes and motor performance. Hasselt University
Understanding face processing and socio-communicative impairments in school-aged very preterm birth survivors; a multimodal approach integrating biobehavioural, neural and autonomic nervous system physiology measures. KU Leuven
Very preterm (VPT) birth is common and associated with particular socio-communicative and socio-emotional vulnerabilities that can have long-term implications and may result in future persistent psychopathology. Nevertheless, social impairments may be subtle and subclinical, and stay unnoticed and untreated. Therefore, more sensitive approaches are needed to elucidate the underlying deficits in VPT birth survivors. The aim of the present ...
Unravelling upper limb function and treatment response in unilateral cerebral palsy: a behavioral and neurological perspective KU Leuven
The exploration of the environment mainly occurs through interaction with our hands: we touch, manipulate, and inspect objects to learn how to use them. In this process, both sensory and motor systems are coordinated to provide integrated information which contribute to an optimal learning and is crucial during the first period after birth. A disruption in the brain regions responsible for these interactions might have devastating ...
Sentence construction in health and neurological disease: an individualized approach using magnetoencephalography and contextualized models of meaning KU Leuven
Language is capable of conveying a seemingly unlimited amount of ideas. The possibility to flexibly combine words into sentences underlies this power. Using recent advances in linguistics & neuroimaging, our goal is to elucidate the neural computations underpinning sentence construction in healthy controls and patients with aphasia.The brain can extract the meaning of a single word in 400 milliseconds. Which neural computations are ...
Selective vulnerability in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal degeneration: integration of postmortem MRI, mass-spectrometry and histopathology KU Leuven
Understanding selective vulnerability is one of the most fundamental challenges in the field of neurodegenerative disease. While structural MRI is widely used in clinical diagnostic settings, it lacks more fine-grained information on the nature of the observed atrophy. The current proposal aims for a multidisciplinary integration of postmortem MRI with in-depth protein and cellular analyses using histopathology and mass-spectrometry. The ...