Many congratulations to Unit postdoctoral researcher Dr Xenia Grande on being awarded a Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

This highly competitive Fellowship will enable Xenia to pursue an innovative research project, enhancing her technical skills, advancing thematic development, and increasing her scientific independence. Xenia will conduct her Fellowship research as part of the Barron Group in the Unit and will also collaborate with Professor Jill O’Reilly and team at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford.

Xenia’s research project aims to provide new insights into the physiological and anatomical mechanisms in the human brain that support the construction of coherent narratives from distinct events. Xenia will focus her work on entorhinal-hippocampal circuits in the brain, investigating them using a cross-scale approach that integrates data from non-invasive 7T functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging with data from intracranial electrophysiological recordings made in epilepsy patients. Xenia anticipates her research will advance understanding of how humans extract structure and comprehension from the external world and that it will lay the groundwork for assessing complex human cognition from a mechanistic perspective in both health and disease.