SAM BERRY

EDUCATION

PhD, Cardiff University, 2017

MSc, Goldsmiths University of London, 2014

BSc, University of West London, 2011

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PROFILE

 

Originally setting myself up for a career in the music industry, I soon realised this wasn’t for me and so took a drastic swerve to study psychology. Although I partly chose this subject because I didn’t know what else to do, I quickly fell in love and have been studying and researching human behaviour and the brain ever since. After the BSc in psychology, where I researched the effects of internet addiction on attention, I began a part-time MSc in cognitive and clinical neuroscience at Goldsmiths university. Here my dissertation used EEG to investigate the neural correlates of creative problem solving during periods of mind-wandering. During this time I also worked as a nursing assistant at the national hospital for neurology and neurosurgery, which gave me a fascinating (and challenging) real-life insight into many of the neurological disorders I was studying. Following this, I moved to Cardiff where I worked with psychiatric patients for a year, before being awarded a Wellcome Trust funded PhD in integrative neuroscience at Cardiff University. Here my work involved using MRI and genetics to study the structural and functional connections of small and often overlooked brain regions, including the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and the subiculum. Now a research associate at Royal Holloway University of London, and a honorary research associate at Cardiff University, I am researching how the hippocampus is connected to the rest of the brain and how these connections may be related to functional differences in, for example, representing space and events.