Elena started her PhD in 2020 as part of the Language in Interaction consortium at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, supervised primarily by Dr. Hanneke den Ouden and Prof. Roshan Cools. Her research investigates the role of dopamine in inference for language and planning, using a combination of functional MRI, psychopharmacology and computational modeling in healthy human volunteers.

Elena obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Pisa (Italy). She then completed her Master in Cognitive Neuroscience at Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento (Italy). After her studies, she worked as research assistant in Prof. Paul Fletcher’s lab at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge (UK). During this time, she specialized in behavioral and neural mechanisms facilitating reward processing and decision making, using food as primary reward.

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