About me

Hi there! I'm Fernanda, a Brazilian Australian academic living in Germany. Currently, I am a Marie Curie fellow at Justus-Liebig University Giessen with the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Quantitative Psychiatry group led by Martin Hebart. During my time in Germany, I aim to provide the visual neuroscience community with a more general tool for retinotopic mapping and to understand individual differences in retinotopic organization.

In 2022, I completed my PhD in Computational Imaging at the University of Queensland. My PhD work involved predicting the functional organization of the human visual cortex from underlying anatomy using geometric deep learning and investigating interindividual variability in the retinotopic organization in human brains. Between 2022 and 2024, I worked as postdoc at the Computational Imaging Group at the University of Queensland, led by Steffen Bollmann, on several projects aiming to improve the robustness of deep learning-based solutions for medical imaging tasks.

To tackle this and other research questions, I am leveraging my interdisciplinary background in Biophysics (Bachelor's degree), Neuroscience (Master's degree), and now the intersection of AI and imaging. I am interested in (geometric) deep learning, vision, neuroscience, and explainable and fair AI research.

But life is not all about research, right?! I love moving my body in my free time! I'm a beginner capoeirista, I love hiking, and I'm finding a new passion in weight lifting (it's really cool to see your muscles grow!) and running. Since 2020, I set goals for myself every year, although I don't always achieve them. For example, since 2020, I've tried to read a book each month, and I've read 10 books in 2020, 11 in 2021, 7 in 2022, and 8 in 2023. Maybe 2024 will be the year I will achieve this goal?! (Spoiler alert: 2024 was not the year) Travelling is another great part of my life, and thanks to my academic work/studies, I've been to 15 different countries so far.