About Annemarie
During childhood, Annemarie became interested in cognitive processes when she was gifted a book for Christmas, A Kid’s Guide to the Brain, at the age of 8. This was coupled with a general interest in science, participating in workshops in engineering and computer science during primary school, culminating in a grade 5 science fair project - and win! - on the function of the human eye.
Her interest in science continued into secondary school when she did a co-op placement in grade 11 in the molecular biology lab at the Ottawa Hospital’s Cancer Centre. This experience inspired her to pursue life sciences at the University of Toronto where she completed her undergraduate degree. She then returned to Ottawa to complete some more neuroscience classes at Carleton University before moving to Germany for her Master’s degree. At the University of Regensburg, she completed a MSc in Experimental and Clinical Neuroscience. For her thesis, she did molecular psychiatry work in the proteomics of schizophrenia in the department of psychiatry at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland.
Maintaining an interest in the neuroscience of psychiatry, her PhD work at the University of Ottawa investigated the dynamics of neural activity in healthy individuals using EEG. This work resulted in three publications and a prestigious award.
Her postdoctoral work at the Institute of Mental Health Research took the measures and findings developed during her PhD and applied it to psychiatric data. This resulted in several important publications, awards, and reviews, and contributed to the intellectual property of medical technology start-up NMHD Inc.
Currently a visiting fellow at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, she is working on the cognitive neuroscience component of the science learning work of the Chemistry Education Research Group. Broadly, the ChemEd research group aims to investigate how individuals (novices and experts) learn and develop mental imagery in science education, as well as the neural correlates of cognitive inhibition, specifically in the context of organic chemistry.
She is currently working on the eye-tracking, EEG, and fNIRS data acquisition and analysis of several studies at Queen’s University. At the same time, she is working on a continuing study in individualised non-pharmacological respiratory treatment for anxiety and several publications in computational modelling in schizophrenia.
