Dr Katharina Wellstein is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Newcastle from Zurich, Switzerland.

After studying Social Psychology and African History at the University of Zurich, she completed her PhD in Computational Psychiatry at ETH Zurich in 2023.

Dr Wellstein’s research interests include affective neuroscience, negative symptoms, interoception, predictive coding and computational modelling.

In Newcastle, Dr Wellstein is working with Professor Michael Breakspear at HMRI in order to investigate the mechanistic underpinnings of negative symptoms using generative models and fMRI data.

She is using the (Bayesian) predictive-coding framework to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in mental disorders and their symptoms. She uses Bayesian generative models as well as Bayesian statistics to draw inferences from the task-based data she acquires.