/ Researchers

Maria Fátima Loureiro

I graduated from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, with a BSc in physics engineering and an MSc in technological physics with a research grant from EU-TMR Access to Large Scale Facilities Program. I worked as a research assistant at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in collaboration with the High Pressure line of ESRF, CNRS, Grenoble. Here I became interested in applications of engineering to vision science. Therefore, I began work as a research technician on an FCT fellowship at the Institute for Biomedical Imaging in Life Sciences (IBILI) in Coimbra’s Faculty of Medicine.

Biografia

I was awarded an FCT doctoral scholarship to develop new methodologies involving quantitative tools based on biophysics/biomathematics to study neurosensory function and connect basic and clinic visual research. In my doctoral work I showed for the first time the presence of two types of functional asymmetry in parallel visual processing pathways, one with a likely source on the eye, and the second reflecting also a cortical interhemispheric asymmetry. Then, I moved to non-invasive neuroimaging (fMRI) with population receptive field (pRF) computational modeling to address the neural correlates underlying these radial asymmetries in human early visual cortex. My area of expertise is in visual perception, in order to understand how biological sensors and cerebral regions encode information regarding visual properties and investigation of visual function according to different technical approaches, such as neuroimaging and psychophysics computerized evaluation.

Fontes

ORCID – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3270-7575