Education: PhD (Psychology & Neuroscience; Dalhousie University); MSc (Psychology & Neuroscience; Dalhousie University); BSc (Hons) (Behavioural Neuroscience; Simon Fraser University)
E-mail: fkosel@uwo.ca
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filip-kosel/
Description of Research Projects:
My research interests lie in the conceptual and technical details of research design; broadly, I’m interested in identifying methodology (including development of research paradigms/apparatus), sample populations (including mouse models and human patient populations), data analysis methods, and other factors that are best suited for a specific research question.
My previous work has spanned both humans and rodents; my undergrad explored a potential relationship between immune system function and sensitivity to pathogen disgust in humans, while my graduate work examined behavioural and neural aspects of behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD; primarily social behaviours) in the 5xFAD mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.
My current work aims to harmonize touchscreen cognitive tasks between rodents and humans and involves development of testing paradigms and apparatus, computer programming, and human and rodent neuroimaging. Specifically, I’m aiming to develop and validate a battery of rodent and human tasks that: 1) are methodologically similar; 2) result in similar performance between human and rodent populations; and 3) utilize the same (or analogous) cognitive domains and neural networks. To this end, I’m leveraging rodent data and tasks from the Bussey-Saksida touchscreen apparatus with human cognitive tasks used by Dr. Adrian Owen (among others) to develop and validate tasks that address the above points. Ultimately, my goal is to develop a battery of harmonized cognitive touchscreen tasks that can be used with both humans and rodents, thereby leading to improved forward- and back-translation of knowledge between species.