Darinka Trübutschek

Darinka Trübutschek

Assistant Professor

Maastricht University

About me

I am an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University, where I have just started my position and am in the process of setting up my research group. My work investigates how the human brain generates and stores subjective experiences - how perception, memory, and decision-making emerge from neural activity, and how they are shaped by our past and guided by our goals. To tackle these questions, I combine psychophysics and eye-tracking with electrophysiology (EEG, MEG, and iEEG), computational modeling, and machine learning.

Beyond my research, I am committed to fostering an open, inclusive, and transparent scientific culture. I actively participate in several open-science initiatives, including serving on the steering committee of the EEGManyPipelines project.

Before joining Maastricht, I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow working with Prof. Lucia Melloni at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt/Main (Germany). Prior to this, I had worked with Prof. Mark Stokes at the University of Oxford (UK) as a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Fondation Fyssen and completed my PhD with Prof. Stanislas Dehaene at Neurospin (Paris, France).

If you are interested in joining the lab or collaborating, feel free to get in touch!

Expertise

Experimental techniques
psychophysics
eye-tracking
(f)MRI
ECoG, EEG, & MEG
Coding
Matlab
R
Python

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Assistant Professor
June 2025 – Present Maastricht, Netherlands
 
 
 
 
 
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Research Fellow
January 2021 – June 2025 Frankfurt/Main, Germany

Main research projects:

  • Deciphering the neuronal mechanisms of how the past shapes current perception in the human brain
  • Event segmentation and time perception: understanding why time feels like flying

Major sources of funding:

  • BIAL Foundation Grant
  • Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
 
 
 
 
 
University of Oxford
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
January 2019 – December 2020 Oxford, UK

Main research project:

  • Exploring the neural mechanisms of cognitive flexibility in working memory

Major source of funding:

  • Fondation Fyssen Postdoctoral Study Grant
 
 
 
 
 
Neurospin
PhD Candidate
November 2014 – October 2018 Saclay/Gif-sur-Yvette, France

Main research project:

  • Characterizing the neuro-cognitive architecture of non-conscious working memory

Major source of funding:

  • Ecole des Neurosciences (ENP) Graduate Fellowship
 
 
 
 
 
Duke University
Postbaccalaureate Fellow in Functional Neuroimaging
June 2010 – August 2012 Durham, NC, USA

Main research project:

  • Exploring the neural correlates of declarative and procedural working memory

Major source of funding:

  • Duke Brain Imaging and Analysis Center Postbaccalaureate Research Fellowship

Selected Awards & Grants

Bial Foundation
Bial Foundation Grant
Project: Event segmentation and time perception: understanding why time feels like flying
Project: Cortical hierarchy of memories - deciphering the neuronal mechanisms of serial dependence in the human brain
Project: Dynamics of activity-silent states and architecture of working memory in the human brain
Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris
Graduate fellowship for Master’s and PhD degree

Recent publications

EEGManyPipelines: A Large-scale, Grassroots Multi-analyst Study of Electroencephalography Analysis Practices in the Wild
EEGManyPipelines: A Large-scale, Grassroots Multi-analyst Study of Electroencephalography Analysis Practices in the Wild
Subjective Evidence Evaluation Survey For Many-Analysts Studies
An #EEGManyLabs study to test the role of the alpha phase on visual perception (a replication and new evidence)

Get in touch!

If you care about similar topics, would like to learn more, or just want to chat, I look forward to hearing from you.