 My research is about something called interoception, which means the connection between the brain and the body and how we monitor, for example, what our heart, lungs, or stomach are doing. So we research this connection between the brain and the body and we try to relate this to the way we make decisions and mental health disorders like anxiety and depression. The work we do in my lab is fundamentally interdisciplinary. So we deal with concepts from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and other areas and the interdisciplinary atmosphere of IS really appealed to me as a place where I could expand that approach. The first time I met Samia was during her IS Fellows presentation where she was presenting an overview of her work on cannabinoids and neurobiology, and I was really struck by the work. It was really interesting and seemed really directly related to what I wanted to do. So in the reception afterwards we started chatting and we found that we had a lot of common interests and that led to a really rich collaboration. I'm a neuropharmacologist by training and I am interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms in our brain that are associated with the development of stress-related psychiatric disorders. I met Mayak at IS in his six-minute seminar and I became immediately interested in the subject that he was presenting because it was how our gut feelings can influence our susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. And I work with neurobiology of psychiatric disorders. So I was immediately thrilled to see someone that was working in a field that was correlated. So there could be a room for a lot of interaction and collaborative work. Our ERC project is called Cannabodies and it's obviously a collaboration with Samia where we're using compounds such as THC and CBD, the active ingredients in cannabis, to see how they influence brain-body connections and interoception and also to see how they change the way the brain makes decisions. And the hope with that project is that we'll be able to generate new findings that can later guide clinical trials and different mental health disorders.