Anna Alessandra Nicoletta Cruz Yu

Alessandra N. C. Yu graduated from Pomona College in 2019 with a BA in Psychology and Philosophy. During her undergraduate, she worked on the nature and conceptualization of emotion with Drs. Ajay Satpute and Shlomi Sher at Pomona College, with Drs. Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni at the the University of Geneva, with Dr. John Coley at Northeastern University, and with Dr. Maria Gendron at Yale University. She also studied interoceptive illusions in emotion perception with Dr. Giovanni Pezzulo at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology. She then completed her Masters of Research in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where she completed her dissertation on the integration of psychological constructionist and dimensional appraisal theories of emotion in an active inference model under the supervision of Drs. Karl Friston, Ryan Smith, Edda Bilek, and Sarah Garfinkel. In the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Alessandra is currently pursuing a PhD in the Neuroscience Program in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, where she is supervised by Dr. Daniela Schiller and Dr. Vincenzo Fiore. In the Schiller Lab, she is working on the Human Affectome, a collaborative, theoretical framework for affective phenomena, as well as a perspective task to investigate agency using computational psychiatry. In the Fiore Lab, she is working on behavioral and intracranial electroencephalography data for a reversal learning task.