Por Joana Carvalho (Fundação Champalimaud).

Unravelling the organization of the visual cortex is fundamental to understanding the degree to which the adult visual cortex has the capability to adapt its function and structure. During this talk, I will explain to you how the visual pathway is shaped by visual experience, predictive mechanisms, damage due to visual eld defects or developmental disorders. My work is focused on the development of advanced techniques and paradigms to characterize population receptive fields (pRFs) and their connections using neurocomputational models. To do so, I combine neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, (fMRI) with biologically-driven neurocomputational models to investigate whether neurons - at the population or subpopulation level – have the capacity to modify their receptive field properties following damage (artificial and natural) to the visual system or following changes in the stimulus.

Bio: Joana Carvalho was born on March 6, 1992 in Leiria, Portugal. In 2010 she started the bachelor and master program in Biomedical Engineering and Biophysics at the University of Lisbon. Here, she had the opportunity to apply the engineering insights acquired during her studies in two internships (one in 2013 at the Wyss institute for biologically inspired engineering at Harvard, Boston, and the second in the domain of biomedical optics, was carried out at Philips Research, Eindhoven). Following her graduation in 2015, Joana started a PhD in Computational Visual Neuroscience at the University Medical Center of Groningen. Her project aimed to investigate the plasticity of the visual cortex. As from January 2020, Joana joined the preclinical MRI group (Shemesh Lab) at Champalimaud Foundation as a post-doctoral researcher. Her project is directed to unravel the neuronal mechanisms underlying brain plasticity using ultra-high resolution fMRI, calcium recordings and visual stimulation.
Email: joana.carvalho@resarch.fchampalimaud.org.