Profile

I am from Sweden but I have lived in the UK for almost 10 years now. I moved to Scotland to start University and never left.

I live in North Wales and it is the perfect place to be if you like water and hiking (and I do!). I usually spend my weekends exploring new mountains or paddleboarding on the surrounding lakes with my friends. I also like to watch movies and my guilty pleasure is any kind of romantic Christmas film (I know, they are terrible – but I really love them!)

The brain is divided into two halves, they are called the left and right hemispheres. For some things, like language, one hemisphere tends to be in control. For example, most people speak with their left hemisphere but see faces with their right hemisphere. It is believed that our brain is designed in this way to make it more efficient, as we often do several things at the same time.

In my work, I try to understand how the two hemispheres of the brain work in different people, and especially if there are differences in the brains of people that are left-handed compared to people that are right-handed. To do this, I use a brain scanner to take pictures of your brain when you do different things, like watching pictures or listening to different sounds. These pictures I take of your brain can tell us which side of the brain is working harder when you do the task.

My typical day looks very different now as I am working from home. Usually, I spend most of my time in my laboratory (which is really only a normal small room with a computer) testing people, or down in the basement of my work building where the brain scanner lives. Now, I spend it in front of my computer in my living room. I have a little “home office” corner that makes me feel like I am at work, and means I won’t get distracted by things on the tv (because as much as I love my job, we all enjoy a good episode of our favourite tv-show). I usually have one or two video calls a day with my colleagues and with my boss. I am lucky because I had time to run many experiments before we started to work from home, so I have a lot of data to make sense of. I also spend a lot of time writing up reports explaining my data to other researchers, so that they know what we found out in our experiments.