Agustina Aragón Daud received an award from the Mind Science Foundation

Agustina Aragon-Daud, a PhD student in Athena Demertzi's laboratory (Physiology of Cognition Laboratory), is one of the 3 winners of the Brainstorm Neuroscience Pitch Competition with her project entitled "Mind Blanking: Looking at the Brain When Thoughts Disappear".

Agustina Aragón Daud

Agustina Aragón Daud is a PhD student in Neuroscience at the Physiology of Cognition Lab, headed by Dr. Athena Demertzi (GIGA CRC-Human Imaging Center, University of Liège) and at the Applied Machine Learning group, under the supervision of Dr. Federico Raimondo (Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine, Brain and Behavior, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany). She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Psychology with a focus on Neuroscience from Favaloro University (Argentina) and completed a predoctoral internship at Charite Universitätsmedizin as part of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin (BCCN) with an Einstein Foundation scholarship. Her current research focuses on detecting “Mind Blanking”—a mental state where the mind feels briefly empty—by decoding brain activity (fMRI/EEG) using machine learning. Her work explores the dynamic boundaries of consciousness in daily life, investigating how the brain shifts between thought and these spontaneous mental pauses. Ultimately, she aims to map subjective conscious experiences onto objective neural patterns, contributing to a better understanding of the mind's spontaneous dynamics.

What is BrainStorm?

The BrainStorm Neuroscience Pitch Competition™ has a specific focus on funding for early-career researchers teamed with senior primary investigators, working on pilot studies to help them obtain grants for further research, with an additional strategic goal designed to incentivize the building of skills in translating complex neuroscience for a general audience through a pitch video. Finalists are guaranteed $30,000 in funding. The general public cast votes online for the best video for an additional $10,000 Audience Choice award.

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