team
current and former members of the lab
Ines Violante
Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Engineering School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London
Ines Violante is a Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Engineering at the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London.
Dr. Violante has a multidisciplinary background, spanning from cellular to human studies. She earned her BSc in Biochemistry and PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Coimbra. Following her PhD, she was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, during which she conducted postdoctoral research at both Imperial College London and University College London. Before joining King’s, Dr. Violante was a Senior Lecturer in Psychological Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, where she continues to hold a visiting position. She is also a visiting researcher at Imperial College London.
Dr. Violante leads the Neural Systems and Neuromodulation Lab, where her team employs a multidisciplinary approach to characterise and understand brain dynamics and shape the activity of brain networks. Utilising computational models, EEG, MRI, and neuromodulatory techniques such as sensory and electrical stimulation, her lab explores how the brain coordinates interactions between regions. Their work aims to understand and manipulate these interactions to influence behaviour and develop novel treatments for neurological and psychiatric conditions.
Laith Alexander
Dr Laith Alexander is an Academic Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry and Experimental Medicine at King’s College London. He completed his PhD in Neuroscience and medical training at the University of Cambridge. His research uses neuroimaging and neuromodulation to investigate prefrontal–limbic circuitry in mood and anxiety disorders. He is currently a lead investigator on the TIDAL study, which aims to develop temporal interference stimulation as a novel treatment for depression and anxiety. He is a practising psychiatrist with a clinical interest in affective disorders.
Junheng Li
Prince Okyere
Tobias Raufeisen
Tobias Raufeisen is a PhD student in the Neural Systems and Neuromodulation Lab since September 2023. He completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Münster and holds a Research Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience from Maastricht University, with a Master’s thesis on memory systems conducted at the University of Glasgow.
His research combines MRI, temporal interference stimulation (TIS), and high-definition EEG to investigate the effects of TIS during sleep, with the aim of improving sleep quality and memory consolidation. He is currently developing closed-loop stimulation protocols, with future goals of modulating sleep quality, sleep depth, and dreams.
Valeria Jaramillo
Dr. Valeria Jaramillo is a Wellcome Early Career Fellow at the University of Surrey, collaborating with the Neural Systems and Neuromodulation Lab. She obtained her BSc in Biochemistry, MSc in Neuroscience, and PhD in the field of sleep research from ETH Zurich. She then went on to conduct a short postdoc in the Baby Sleep Lab at the University Hospital Zurich before she was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc Mobility Fellowship to join the research groups of Prof. Derk-Jan Dijk and Dr. Ines Violante at the University of Surrey. Her postdoctoral research focused on REM sleep brain oscillations and their modulation using closed-loop auditory stimulation. She now leads a research programme which aims at discovering the mechanisms by which REM sleep contributes to brain function using multimodal approaches and to evaluate neuromodulation interventions to improve REM sleep.
Daniella Jones
Gabrielle Allohverdi
Gabrielle Allohverdi joined the NSN Lab in August 2025 as a Research Assistant in Neuroimaging and Neuromodulation. Gabrielle Allohverdi obtained a BSc, with a major in biology and a minor in psychology in 2020 from the Western University in London Ontario. During her undergraduate years, Gabrielle completed coursework in neuroscience, neuroimaging data analysis and the psychology of altered states of consciousness and developed an interest in neuroinformatics. Gabrielle completed her MSc in Medical Science with a concentration in computational neuroscience within the Institute for Medical Science at the University of Toronto in 2024. Currently, Gabrielle is assisting with a project investigating the non-invasive modulation of the cortical-hippocampal dialogue during sleep in humans by employing temporal intereference (TI) stimulation.
Anna Sadilova
Annie has started her PhD in the lab in October 2025. She completed her Undergraduate degree in Biochemistry, followed by Master’s by Research in Molecular Neuroscience focussing on the role of lipids in synapses.
Her doctoral project sits at the intersection of neuroimaging and neuromodulation, leveraging ultra-high field MRI to investigate brain dynamics during sleep. By combining this with Temporal Interference Stimulation, she aims to modulate sleep activity in healthy volunteers and translating these insights to clinical applications in epilepsy.
Yishu Chen
Yishu Chen (陈一澍) is a PhD student who joined the lab in October 2025. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Chemistry and a Master’s degree in Psychology. During her Master’s, her main focus was using Temporal Interference Stimulation (TIS) targeting left hippocampus to enhance episodic memory performance. She also used fMRI to understand the neural effects of TIS.
Yishu’s PhD project is the TIDAL study, where she is using TIS to modulate specific abnormal neural circuits in depression. In the study, she is combining multi-modal neuroimaging and physiological techniques to explore TIS’s potential effects in mood and anxiety disorders.
Xiaonan Wan
Hope Henderson
Hope Henderson is completing her master’s studies as a full-time placement student in the Neural Systems and Neuromodulation lab under Dr. Violante’s supervision.
After working as a hospital nursing assistant and earning her BSc in Psychology from the University of Idaho, she moved to France to pursue a Master’s degree in Neuroscience from Aix-Marseille University.
Hope previously conducted pre-clinical research in rodents to investigate the safety of a novel non-invasive brain stimulation method using radio frequencies. Now, she is developing and piloting PsychoPy tasks that will be used to investigate the effects of brain stimulation on memory consolidation in humans.
Alumni
Tibor Auer
Henry Hebron
Danielle Kurtin
Will Mayes
Visiting or Affiliated Researchers
BMEIS, KCL
Nima Norbu Sherpa
NIHR Pre-Doctoral Clinical Fellow School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London
Nima Norbu Sherpa is an NIHR Pre-Doctoral Fellow at King’s College London with interdisciplinary training in experimental medicine, psychology, and diagnostic radiography. His research focuses on transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and its relevance to incentive salience and addiction neuroscience. He is the lead researcher in two studies, including an MRC IAA-funded project in heavy tobacco smokers and a King’s Together-funded study in heavy cannabis use, using behavioural paradigms alongside multimodal neuroimaging at 7T ultra-high-field MRI. His work has previously been recognised through the NIHR Pre Application Support fellowship, King’s College London ECR Travel Grant and the George & Dorothy Irving Magnusson Fellowship.
- Catalina Trujillo Llano, DAAD Doctoral Fellow, Universitätsmedizin Greifswald
Project Students
- Amelia D’Aubney (2025/26, BEng) — Hormone-Dependent Modulation of Brain Networks Supporting Memory After Menopause
- Riya Tripathi (2025/26, MEng) — Optimising an fMRI Pipeline for Detecting Hippocampal Activity in Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease
- Samia Zaman (2025/26, MEng) — Decoding Memory-Related Neural Activity During Wakefulness and Sleep: Effects of Non-Invasive Hippocampal Stimulation