A team from experimental, clinical, and social psychology working together on interdisciplinary projects.
Maria completed her doctorate in experimental psychology with Dr. Jan Kroeze at Utrecht University (Netherlands) and trained at the John B. Pierce Laboratory and Yale University School of Medicine (New Haven, CT, USA), where she did postdoctoral fellowships with Dr. Dana Small and Dr. Lawrence Marks in the psychophysics and neuroimaging of taste, smell and flavor perception. She uses neuromodulation, physiology and causal brain network modeling to study the mechanisms of food preference formation and overeating. In 2019 she joined Mersin University (Turkey) as a visiting research scientist with a grant to optimize and test vagus nerve stimulation of gut–brain communication as an intervention for obesity. An associate professor since 2024, she leads several funded projects on visual food processing in the brain, non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation, and electromyography of appetite responses to food.
Emre is a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Mersin University. His research focuses on traumatic stress, personality disorders and psychopathology, and his current work examines vagus nerve stimulation in specific phobias (supported by TÜBİTAK, Project no. 323K045). His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy; the European Journal of Psychotraumatology; and the Journal of Loss and Trauma.
Resul is a research assistant in experimental psychology, working on psychophysiology. His interests include transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation and probabilistic learning.
Our undergraduate and graduate researchers take active roles in lab projects.
