Science Slam 2024

Lisa Vos is a PhD student at the Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology at the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding how people interpret socio-emotional information in their everyday lives, and how this relates to mental health, emotional experiences, and interpersonal difficulties within close relationships. Lisa’s talk will address the topic of depression and interpreting social situations in daily life.

Jiahe Wang completed a research master’s degree in business (organization and strategy) at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management. He is now a PhD candidate in strategy and entrepreneurship at the same school. Jiahe’s research mainly investigates how emerging entrepreneurs obtain financial and other resources from external stakeholders,  via configurations of signaling and narratives in contexts such as equity crowdfunding and pitching competition. This will also be the focus of his talk. 

Sonali Kulkarni is a PhD student at the Department of Culture Studies at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. She is interested in children's literature and the platformisation of reading and literary cultures, for example BookTok (the literary subculture on TikTok). In her PhD, she investigates the platformisation of reading and how this (paradoxically) relates to the practice of re-reading books, in particular adults re-reading children's and young adult books, to draw on a framework of age, affect, attention, and affordance.

Valentina Sanchez Melchor is a PhD student at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Her current research is on Graph Neural Networks and Brain Networks. Before this, she completed an MSc in Data Science and AI at Queen Mary, University of London. During the Science Slam, she will talk about the paper she is currently working on, titled 'Data Augmentation Techniques for fMRI Data in Machine Learning applications: A Technical Survey', which evaluates all the existing techniques for creating synthetic fMRI data. Functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity.