Today, Annalina V. Mayer successfully defended her PhD! Huge congratulations, Annalina!
Annalina started as one of our first student assistants back in 2015. Very quickly she became a full member of our lab. At that time we were setting up a huge, multi-center (Leipzig/Lübeck) oxytocin trial on autism and were very convinced that Annalina would be the ideal person to roll out this project. Thus, we offered Annalina a PhD position right after her MSc in Psychology. During the last 4 years Annalina not only successfully coordinated this very complicated clinical trial, she also managed to develop own experiments, analyzed different data sets (e.g. another clinical oxytocin trial), supervised BSc and MSc students and participated in several other ongoing projects of our group. Clinically, autism was obviously her major focus during her PhD. Methodologically, Annalina focused on behavioral and functional neuroimaging analyses in the context of social reward, affect and empathy. Now, after her PhD Annalina will start her clinical training our Department of Psychiatry in order to even better integrate affective neuroscience with a translational perspective in future.
Check out the core two papers out of her PhD time:
Mayer AV, Preckel K, Ihle K, Piecha FA, Junghanns K, Reiche S, Rademacher, Kamp-Becker I, Stroth S, Roepke S, Küpper C, Engert V, Singer T, Kanske P, Paulus FM, Krach S
No support for oxytocin modulation of reward-related brain function in autism: evidence from a randomized controlled trial. Preprint https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.19.21253900
Mayer AV, Wermter AK, Stroth S, Alter P, Haberhausen M, Stehr T, Paulus FM, Krach S & Kamp-Becker I. Randomized clinical trial shows no substantial modulation of empathy-related neural activation by intranasal oxytocin in autism. Sci Rep; 2021 Jul 23;11(1):15056. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-94407-x.