I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, working with Dr. Arne Ekstrom and Dr. Carol Barnes. I employ fMRI and immersive virtual reality to study the effects of age on spatial memory abilities. I am funded by the NIH/NIA T32 Postdoctoral fellowship in the neurobiology of aging and Alzheimer’s disease from the Arizona Alzheimer’s consortium.

I obtained my PhD in November 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Michael Rugg at the Center for Vital Longevity – The University of Texas at Dallas. My dissertation focused on the relationship between age, cognitive performance, and the fMRI-based neural correlates of episodic memory encoding and retrieval. A large strand of my work employs simultaneous fMRI with eye-tracking to examine the interactions between age differences in neural selectivity, memory success, and exploratory eye movements during memory encoding and retrieval.

Before arriving at UT Dallas, I earned my BSc (Hons) in Psychology at The University of Essex in the United Kingdom. Here, I completed a thesis under the supervision of Dr. Vincenzo Romei examining the impact of 10Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation on working memory capacity. Moreover, I worked as a Research assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Vanessa Loaiza where I completed a project examining the impact of semantic relatedness on age-related associative binding deficits in working and episodic memory.

I grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia. In my free time, I love to spend time outdoors, play with my sweetest dog Kira, tend to my army of house plants, and sometimes I paint and draw too.