2026 Conference

The Brainbox Initiative is honoured to welcome Dr Matthew Rushworth as the keynote speaker for this year's Brainbox Initiative Conference. 

Dr Matthew Rushworth is the head of the department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. His research is aimed at understanding the brain processes that allow us to work out how good the outcome of a choice might be and which allow us to make decisions between multiple choices.

His work places a particular focus on the role played by areas of prefrontal and cingulate cortex. He is also interested in looking at the connexions between brain regions and the interactions they mediate during decision-making and attentional selection. 

Liyi Chen, MD, PhD, is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at the Leuven Brain Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium.

With a clinical background in neurology, his research focuses on the mechanisms and translational potential of non-invasive neuromodulation, including transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation (tFUS), trigeminal nerve stimulation, and transcranial electrical stimulation. By combining in vivo multichannel electrophysiology, human EEG and intracranial EEG recordings, and cross-species experimental approaches, he investigates how neuromodulation influences neuronal excitability, hippocampal–cortical circuits, memory processing, and cognition.

His recent work has particularly examined how ultrasound parameters shape neuronal responses and how peripheral and transcranial stimulation can be optimized to modulate memory-related brain networks. His research has been published in journals including Brain Stimulation and Translational Psychiatry.

Associate Professor Melanie Fleming leads the NeuroRehabilitation Research group in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford.  The aim of the group is to better understand the role of sleep in learning and recovery after brain injury, and to test novel techniques to boost sleep and rehabilitation processes.

Alongside this, Dr Fleming is the Academic Lead for Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement for the Medical Sciences Division of the University of Oxford, the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, and the MRC Centre of Research Excellence in Restorative Neural Dynamics.

Dr Melanie Fleming is passionate about working together with patients and the public to guide research, and through these roles she supports others to engage with the public in a meaningful way.

Dr Polytimi Frangou is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging (OxCIN) and the Brain Network Dynamics Unit (BNDU) at the University of Oxford. She completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece.

Dr Frangou is interested in the neurophysiological mechanisms through which brain chemicals GABA and acetylcholine facilitate human cognitive function and brain plasticity. To address these questions, she combines ultra-high field MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy with pharmacology and non-invasive brain stimulation, in healthy individuals and clinical populations.

Her work spans a range of neuromodulation techniques, including transcranial electrical stimulation (tDCS, tACS), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), peripheral nerve stimulation (median and vagus nerve), and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS).

Dr Alekhya Mandali is a Lecturer at the School of Psychology, University of Sheffield, and heads the Cognitive Computational Neuropsychiatry lab. She completed her PhD in computational neuroscience at IIT Madras, followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford.

Her current research focuses on two themes: understanding how electrical stimulation protocols affect cortical hyperexcitability and its reduction, and developing neuromodulatory interventions for impulsive-compulsive disorders, particularly alcohol use disorder.

Her work integrates non-invasive (TMS/tES) and invasive brain stimulation, electrophysiology, and computational modelling to identify neural and behavioural markers of neuropsychiatric disorders and to design mechanism-based interventions.

Sjoerd Meijer is a PhD student at the Verhagen Lab at the Donders Centre for Cognition.

Passionate about circuit-level neuroimaging and neuromodulation, he aims to discover how brain stimulation can alleviate anxiety in humans by using a combination of state-of-the-art brain stimulation techniques, behavioural tasks, and functional neuroimaging to map causal brain-behaviour relationships. His research uses transcranial ultrasonic stimulation (TUS), which enables the targeting of the source of anxiety deep in the brain.

Furthermore, Sjoerd Meijer investigates the potential anxiolytic effects of dual-site transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on approach-avoidance behaviour in social anxiety. His research could open up new avenues for anxiety disorder therapies.

Tobias Raufeisen is a PhD student in neuroscience at the University of Surrey, where he researches the effects of non-invasive deep brain stimulation on sleep. His work combines computational modelling with simultaneous imaging and stimulation during sleep to test predictions experimentally, with the long-term goal of developing new methods for investigating the neural mechanisms of sleep, and translating them into therapeutic interventions.

Prior to his PhD, he studied the interactions between memory systems via EEG recordings at Maastricht University. Outside the lab, Tobias enjoys making music and practising martial arts.

Eva Woods is a third year PhD researcher studying neurophysiology in the Discipline of Physiology, School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, and a Huntington’s Disease Society of America Human Biology Project Research Fellow.

Her research focuses on identifying early biomarkers of Huntington’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis using multimodal neurophysiology and neuroimaging techniques, including electroencephalography, transcranial magnetic stimulation and magnetic resonance imaging. Her research is supported in part by the Brainbox Research Challenge, awarded to her supervisor Dr Róisín McMackin, and by the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

Eva is actively involved in Huntington’s disease advocacy and patient and public involvement, including leading Huntington’s Disease Research Awareness Days and establishing Ireland’s first Huntington’s disease patient and public involvement panel. Her work has been recognised with awards including Best Platform Presentation at the British Society for Clinical Neurophysiology/Irish Society for Clinical Neurophysiology meeting and the Neuroscience Ireland Best Speaker Award.