Marie Zelenina
Contacts
E-mail: marie.zelenina[at]nih.gov
Professional networks
Research topics
- Psychiatry
- Affective neuroscience
- Oxytocin
- Neuroimaging
- EEG
Biography
I am a Biomedical Engineering PhD student at the University of Lisbon, IBEB, and a Pre-doctoral Research Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), NIH, USA. At IBEB, I am a member of Dr Diana Prata Lab, and at NIMH I am closely co-supervised by Dr Daniel Pine, chief of Section on Development and Affective Neuroscience, Dr Bruno Averbeck, Chief of Section on Learning and Decision Making, and Dr Dylan Nielson, NIMH Machine Learning Team.
I have been with Dr Prata’s team since 2017, which is when I started my MSc in Neurobiology research under her supervision. I used human EEG to look into the effect of oxytocin on human brain. Prior to that, I competed a MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, UK, with the focus on Natural Language Processing. For my thesis work, I used machine learning to analyze human eyetracking data for a Natural Language Processing task.
My current overarching research interest is affective neuroscience. Over the course of my PhD, I have been involved in various projects that address diagnosis and treatment of adolescent and adult depression. Specifically, I worked with children’s multimodal data to validate depression measurements and gather insights in topics such as informant discrepancy (parent-child disagreement on whether the child is depressed). I’ve also contributed to collecting and analyzing multi-echo MRI data with the goal of improving targeting of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for treatment-resistant depression. I keep a keen interest in neuropsychoendocrinology, specifically in the effect of oxytocin on human brain and its role in various psychiatric disorders, and also in the role of dopamine and serotonin in affective disorders.
Outside of research, I enjoy spending time in nature (hiking, backpacking, camping) and board games. I am also a theatre lover and a travel enthusiast.