People

Luke E. Miller 

Principal Investigator

Luke joined the Donders Centre for Cognition as an Assistant Professor of Sensorimotor Neuroscience in the fall of 2021. He previously had postdoctoral fellowships at the Donders Institute (w/ Pieter Medendorp) and at the ImpAct Team in Lyon, France (w/ Alessandro Farnè). It was during this time that he began researching the neural and computational mechanisms underlying the sensory embodiment of tools—the ability to use them as somatosensory extensions of the body. His current research aims to uncover the computational principles underlying neural body representation and their plasticity. He currently teaches an MSc course in the Artificial Intelligence department on sensorimotor neurotechnology, which among other things covers the principles of neural prosthetics and brain machine interfaces.

Valeria Peviani

Postdoctoral Fellow

Valeria Peviani is a postdoctoral fellow at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior, supported by the Radboud Excellence Initiative. She is interested in the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the perception of body and body part position and shape. Before joining the Donders Institute, she got her PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Pavia, Italy. There she researched healthy and pathological cognitive functioning, in particular in the context of body perception and representation (supervisor: Prof. G. Bottini). After her PhD, she continued her research in the lab of David Poeppel, under the direct supervision of Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany).

Dominika Radziun

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dominika Radziun is a postdoctoral researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. Her research focuses on understanding the plasticity of spatial body representations from a computational perspective. For example, how do hand-extending exoskeletons change the computations that turn somatosensory input into a representation of the hand? She got her PhD in Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where she researched body perception and brain plasticity in blind and sighted individuals under the supervision of Prof. Henrik Ehrsson (Karolinska Insitutet) and Prof. Marcin Szwed (Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland). Her personal webpage can be found here.

Huseyin Orkun-Elmas

PhD Student

Hüseyin is a PhD student in the BBT Lab at Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. He completed his MSc in neuroscience at Bilkent University, under the supervision of Dr. Burcu Aysen Urgen. During his MSC he investigated how prior information influences biological motion perception, utilizing EEG and behavioral experiments. Now at Donders Institute, Hüseyin's research focus has pivoted to tactile localization. He's deeply interested in modeling the computational mechanisms that underlie tactile localization in both 2D and 3D spaces. His overarching goal is to decipher the neural implementations of these computations.

Floris van Wettum

PhD Student

Floris is a PhD student in the BBT Lab at Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior. He completed his MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University under the supervision of Luke and Prof Medendorp. For his thesis project, he explored how sensory substitution can be leveraged to create an additional sense of body space, and whether this additional sense follows computational rules of multisensory integration. For his PhD research, Floris will explore the computational principles of body augmentation, looking specifically at 1) how finger-extending exoskeletons become functionally fused to representations of the body, and 2) whether this finger-exo fusion is driven by sensory feedback.

Amany El-Gharabawy

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Amany is currently completing her MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. For her thesis project, Amany is continuing the lab's exploration into how sensory substitution can be leveraged to create an additional sense of body space, and what the underlying computations of this ability are. She will focus specifically on whether we can integrate this additional body sense with other modalities (e.g., vision) and how this integration is affected by noise inherent in the sensory signals.

Siebe Geurts

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Siebe is completed his MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. For his thesis project, he investigated how learning to use finger-extending exoskeletons modulates proprioceptive representations of the user's biological and exoskeletal fingers. He is continuing in the lab as a Research Assistant, focusing on developing paradigms that allow for precise computational modelling of somatosensory spatial perception.

Fenna Rasing

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Fenna is currently completing an internship for their MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. She is applying machine learning to EEG data to decode the coordinate systems used to map touch in external space.

Laurens van Rongen

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Laurens is currently completing his MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. For his thesis project, Laurens is exploring how the geometry of the body constrains visual-tactile integration. He is designing a VR-based multisensory paradigm that measures multisensory integration within and across fingers. He will then computationally characterize these constraints (if they are there) using the framework of Bayesian Causal Inference.

Arina Schippers

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Arina completed a research internship for her MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. Her research question focused on whether body extensions (e.g., exoskeletons) feel lighter after they become embodied by the user. She is continuing to explore these results as a Student Assistant in the lab.

Chris Vajdík

Master's Student – Artificial Intelligence

Chris is currently completing their MSc in the Artificial Intelligence Department at Radboud University. For their thesis project, Chris is exploring the ethics of sensorimotor technology. Their specific focus will be on the importance of including affected populations (e.g., amputees; paraplegics; etc.) in the co-creation of restoration devices.

Alumni

PhD students

Cécile Fabio (2018–2022)  - Neural oscillations and tool-extended sensing

MSc thesis students

David Teulings (2024-2025) - Metacognition and body augmentation

Bram van Hees (2023-2024) - Tactile remapping and body representation in feedfoward neural networks

Rob Pennekamp (2023-2024) - Neural dynamics and predictive state estimation in S1

Manon Joosten (2022-2023) - Bayesian models of posture perception

Tobias van der Gaag (2022-2023) - Computational modelling of visual-tactile integration

Felix Jarto (2021-2022) - Neuromechanical modelling of tool sensing

Lefteris Zografos (2020-2021) - Reference frame transformations during tool use

BSc honours thesis students

Tamar Couprie (2023-2024) - Tactile statistical learning and pupil dilation

Niklas Rietschel (2023-2024) - Visual-tactile integration and peripersonal space

Leo Pfeiffer (2022-2023) - Proprioceptive representations of hand-held tools