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Dr. Sarah Garfinkel is a Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry and Consciousness Science based in Neuroscience in the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. She also has a part time appointment in the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

Biography

The research of Dr. Garfinkel centres on body-brain interactions underlying emotion and cognition. For example, she investigates how individual differences in interoception (detection of internal bodily sensations) can influence emotion and memory. Based in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, she also determines how aberrant bodily and neural mechanisms can contribute to symptom maintenance in psychiatric conditions such as Anxiety, PTSD, Autism and Schizophrenia. She has a particular interest in the heart, such as interoception and heart-brain interactions underlying the gating of fear responses.

In each stage of her career Dr. Garfinkel has received extensive training in a number of diverse techniques, including memory and pharmacology (PhD, University of Sussex), psychiatry and neuroimaging (University of Michigan) and autonomic affective neuroscience (BSMS with Hugo Critchley). Together, these techniques provide her with the tools to pursue an integrative approach combining functional imaging (fMRI) with cardiovascular monitoring/manipulation to investigate body-brain interactions in emotion and cognition.