Simon Schaerlaeken
Doctoral candidate
University of Geneva
After obtaining my Master of Sciences in Life Sciences and Technologies at EPFL, Lausanne and conducting my master project at UC Berkeley, USA during a semester, I started my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Didier Grandjean at the Neuroscience of Emotion and Affective Dynamics lab. My Master’s degree was focused on Computational Neurosciences however I also have some insights in engineering topics such as Mechanics, Electronics and Computer Sciences acquired during my Bachelor's degree at the University of Liege, Belgium.
I’m currently working on a project studying the impact of gesture and conceptual metaphor dynamics on the production and perception of musical emotions. This interdisciplinary project involved many people, from different backgrounds contributing together at many levels. As a PhD student, I will be studying the dimensional organization of conceptual metaphors related to body, gestures and space in the domain, the relation between these metaphors and musical emotion and acoustical features, and how they can impact musical performance. Eventually the project will be focused on these features are processed and decoded at the brain level.