Marla Dressel

Marla is a Ph.D. student working under the mentorship of Dr. Abigail Marsh and joined the graduate program in 2022. She earned a BSc and Honours BSc in Psychology from the University of Groningen, as well as a Research MSc in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam, majoring in Cognitive Neurosciences and Psychological Methods. During her master’s, she worked as a Research Intern at the Social Brain Lab led by Dr. Christian Keysers and Dr. Valeria Gazzola, and during her thesis, at the lab of Dr. David Amodio at NYU & UvA, where she most recently studied the role of adaptive empathy in prejudice. Marla is deeply fascinated by the social neuroscience of empathy and its role in mental disorders like psychopathy, which she will specifically focus on during her Ph.D. She is also eager to support her research with state-of-the-art methods, including computational modeling and machine learning, as well as Open Science.