Dr Liat Levita
Neuroscience of adolescent development and mental health
Are you interested in exploring the adolescent brain? If so, join the Developmental Adolescent Neuroscience Lab for a PhD focused on neural mechanisms behind emotional, cognitive, and mental health changes during adolescence. Our lab uses EEG, MRI, MRS, psychophysiology, and behavioural testing to study typical and atypical development.
If you are offered a place on the Programme and would subsequently like to do a rotation in my lab, I will ask you to prepare a research proposal in advance. You can tailor it to our focus areas: neural mechanisms underlying adolescent anxiety, cortical plasticity, adaptive or maladaptive development, and adolescent brain responses to threat and fear. Alternatively, you can propose a topic aligned with the lab’s broader objectives. For a PhD in the lab, it is important that we discuss your interests and ideas and how they complement and extend the goals of the research in the lab and the methods we use. The aim is to jointly create an impactful project that you are passionate about, advance your research skill set, and lead to high quality and high-impact publications. I would be very happy to talk with you about any potential projects and the work in our lab, so do get in touch.
Contact me at L.Levita@sussex.ac.uk. Please include a brief outline of your research interests, experience, and your CV so we can discuss potential PhD projects and develop a proposal that aligns with both your interests and the lab's goals.
Key references
- Linton & Levita (2021). Potentiated perceptual neural responses to learned threat during Pavlovian fear acquisition and extinction in adolescents. Dev Sci. 2021 Sep;24(5):e13107. doi: 10.1111/desc.13107.
- Gyurkovics M and Levita L (2021). Dynamic Adjustments of Midfrontal Control Signals in Adults and Adolescents. Cerebral Cortex, 31(2), 795-808. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhaa258
- Aytemur A and Levita L (2021). Neural correlates of implicit agency during the transition from adolescence to adulthood: An ERP study Neuropsychologia 158, 107908
- Ellis R, Milne E & Levita L (2021) Reduced visual cortical plasticity in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Brain Res Bull. Doi: https: 10.1016/j.brainresbull.2021.01.019
- Howsley, P., & Levita, L. (2017) Anticipatory representations of reward and threat in perceptual areas from preadolescence to late adolescence. Dev Cogn Neurosci. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2017.03.001
- Heller, A. S., & Casey, B. (2016). The neurodynamics of emotion: delineating typical and atypical emotional processes during adolescence. Developmental Science, 19(1), 3-18. doi:10.1111/desc.12373
Visit Liat's for a full list of publications.