AIAS Future Fellow Micah Allen new Lundbeck Foundation Fellow
As a very promising young researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience, AIAS Fellow Micah Allen has received a DKK 10 million grant from the Lundbeck Foundation to investigate gut feelings and how the neural mechanisms of brain and body interact.
AIAS-COFUND Fellow Micah Allen and Associate Professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University can now also entitle himself a ‘Lundbeck Foundation Fellow’. Today Micah Allen has received the impressive grant of DKK 10 million by The Lundbeck Foundation to boost his research in cognitive neuroscience even further.
Own lab: The Embodied Computation Group (ECG)
The grant runs over a five-year period and will enable Micah Allen to launch his own research lab, the Embodied Computation Group (ECG), which will be based at both Aarhus University and Cambridge Psychiatry. With the project, Micah Allen and his multi-disciplinary research group will study how our decision-making and conscious perception is shaped by visceral and embodied processes. The project represents a stunning opportunity to propel our understanding of how our bodies shape our minds.
The cognitive neuroscience of brain body interaction
Micah’s research focuses on our gut feelings. His theory is that our decisions are rarely completely rational and we are strongly influenced by gut feelings. Micah will be investigating whether these gut feelings are actually linked to the signals sent from our inner organs to the brain.
“I’ll be conducting experiments using beta blockers to see whether the decisions people make differ depending on whether their heart rate is slow or fast. I’ll also be studying patients who’ve had their stomach removed, which involves cutting the vagus nerve that normally sends sensory information back to the brain from the body. It will be really interesting to see whether this diminished body-brain signalling has an impact on our decisions,” Micah says.
More about Micah Allen’s project
Watch Lundbeck Foundation's video about Allen's body-mind project:
https://youtu.be/VexdQY9L0wc
Visit Micah Allen’s lab website:
https://the-ecg.org/
Follow and engage with Micah and his Lab on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/visceral_mind
Dual fellowhips: Lundbeck Foundation and AIAS-COFUND
Micah Allen will commence his AIAS-COFUND fellowship on 1 February 2019 and his AIAS project goes very well hand-in-hand with his Lundbeck Foundation fellowship due to research concentration as the scope of both fellowships, and as both of his fellowship projects are focusing on the visceral mind.
As Anne-Marie Engel, Head of Talent & Career Programmes at the Lundbeck Foundation, says about the Lundbeck Foundation fellowships:
“Our five new Fellows will have a unique opportunity to conduct targeted and concentrated research over a five-year period and, at the same time, build up a research team and grow as research directors.
The Lundbeck Foundation
The Lundbeck Foundation has supported five young researchers with a DKK10 million grant – three of these five new Lundbeck Foundation Fellows are from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University.
Read more about the Lundbeck Foundation and the five new Lundbeck Foundation Fellows here
Contact
Micah Allen, AIAS Fellow, Associate Professor
Phone: +45 7179 0914
micah.allen@medschl.cam.ac.uk
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) and
Dept. of Clinical Medicine
Aarhus University
Denmark