How nice is it to cheer yourself up with that favorite ice-cream during a hectic day? Occasionally, a sweet treat helps. However, many individuals (over)consume ultra-processed food whenever stressed, accumulating unnecessary calories. Understanding why stress-eating can escalate to excessive forms is key since a predicted 4 billion people will suffer of obesity by 2035. Major studies have shown that high-palatable food-cues and stress predict obesity/binge-eating. Yet, although everyone in Western societies is overexposed to these factors only few develop these clinical conditions. What then makes some stressed people overeat? Here, I tackle this question by investigating an understood emotion: relief.

Sleep is essential for our health, yet we still don’t exactly understand how so. This project aims to improve our understanding by developing new concepts and methods to study sleep in a more comprehensive and biologically meaningful way. Creating the infrastructure to gather large data with the help of wearable devices and citizen scientists, the project works towards new insights into the full complexity of sleep, both within and across nights. Ultimately, this research will help improve sleep health, benefiting individuals and society as a whole.

Connections are critical: How do we remember things briefly? How does our brain temporarily store information, like remembering a phone number? This research explores the idea that rapid changes in connections between brain cells are crucial for this ‘working memory’. Using cutting-edge recording techniques and advanced analysis methods, which we’ll develop, we’ll investigate how brain cells in rats and humans rapidly adapt their connections during memory tasks. Our innovations will be useful to neuroscience broadly, and our experiments will shed light on how the brain maintains information, at the levels of individual cell connections and of larger-scale ‘brain wave’ networks.

We will investigate how dysfunctions in network interactions between brain regions can explain the physiological basis of various cognitive disorders. We will in particular focus on how the fronto-striatal system is involved in controlling activity in posterior regions. This will be investigated using a range of neuroimaging techniques including brain stimulation. For instance, we will explore how cognitive training protocols aimed at changing network properties can influence the fronto-striatal network. Likewise, it will be investigated how neurofeedback training can alter the brain network to reduce symptoms associated with cognitive disorders.

No less than one-third of the patients suffering from anxiety disorders and depression do not respond to current treatments. A key pathological feature of these disorders involves a smaller hippocampus due to reduced brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signalling. Increasing BDNF levels in the hippocampus, therefore, represents a promising target for treatment. However, the major obstacle is that no methods exist to get BDNF over the blood-brain barrier selectively into the hippocampus. We aim to overcome this obstacle by using for the first-time low intensity-pulsed focused ultrasound to guide liposomes carrying BDNF DNA to the hippocampus in rats.