Research Areas:

• Cortical control of movement
• Sensorimotor integration
• Neuroscientific imaging methods

Biography:

Manca Peskar received her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Biopsychology at FAMNIT University in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Fascinated by the human brain, she conducted her master thesis investigating electrophysiological (EEG) correlates of navigating in a virtual environment. Growing appetite for knowledge of the neuroimaging methods led her to continue her education at the Cognitive Neuroscience research master programme at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. She completed the latter in 2019 with a study conducted at Imperial College London, in which she used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data to study the functional connectivity of brain regions in clinically depressed before and after a medical intervention.
Since November 2020, she has been a doctoral student at the Technical University of Berlin and is employed by the Science and Research Centre Koper as a young researcher working on the TwinBrain project (Horizon 2020). The project investigates the link between cognition and cortical control of movement in simple and complex locomotion in healthy adults and Parkinson’s disease patients. During the educational process, she was actively involved in several research projects in the domestic and international space.
As a research assistant, Manca actively participated in the following projects:

• PANGeA – Physical activity and nutrition for quality aging; she collected and processed data on the cognitive abilities of the elderly
• Psychological assessment of professional Slovenian gymnasts; semi-structured interviews and data processing, author and presenter at the 4th International Scientific Conference of the Slovenian Gymnastics Association
• Age-related changes in sensorimotor integration: ERP study; she studied within and between-subject differences in reaction times
• The impact of a low-carbohydrate diet on health indicators; she studied the cognitive abilities of overweight individuals before and after dietary intervention
• Visuospatial attentional effects of FEF and IPS disruption: an fMRI/TSM study; sodelovala pri zbiranju in analizi podatkov
• Neural Correlates of Changes in Personality Trait Measures after Psilocybin-assisted Psychotherapy to Depressed Patients; Master thesis