PhD Candicate
A central question in decision-making is when to persist in our efforts and when it is better to stop. Part of the COPE project, Rares is a PhD candidate working with Eliana Vassena, Tim Vriens, and Erno Hermans, studying effortful decision-making and the neuromodulatory systems that support it. The goal of this ERC-funded project is to build on a biologically plausible computational model of the brain to better understand how rewards, effort, and environmental context are integrated during decision-making. Once validated, this model may also help explain how motivational processes become disrupted in psychopathology, potentially informing more personalized treatment approaches. To investigate these questions, Rares combines computational modeling with psychopharmacological, fMRI, and behavioral data. Before starting his PhD, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in Psychology & Technology from Eindhoven University of Technology and a master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from Radboud University.