Curriculum Vitae

PhD

Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) and Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra (Coimbra, Portugal)

• Thesis
  • Inside of the Creative Mind:Unravelling the Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Musical Creativity
• My PhD Project was focused on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying musical creativity within the framework of musical performance. I’ve used musical improvisation as a model behaviour and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as a technique in order to access the correspondent brain activity in professional pianists.
• Study I sought to investigate the specific neurocognitive effects derived from expertise in musical improvisation. Results show a significant negative association between improvisational training and activity in a number of cortical regions in the right hemisphere. Besides, more experienced improvisers showed higher functional connectivity during improvisation between prefrontal, premotor, and motor regions.
  • See Pinho et al. (2014).
• Study II explored the contribution of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) in creative cognition. Main findings highlight that deliberative creative cognition can be implemented in different ways given different circumstances. Higher activity was registered in the right DLPFC as well as in the parietal lobe and right dorsal premotor cortex, when contrasting structural conditions with emotional conditions. Conversely, the DLPFC was functionally connected to the default mode network during emotional conditions.
  • See Pinho et al. (2016).
• Faculty Supervisors
  • Fredrik Ullén
  • Örjan de Manzano
  • Peter Fransson
  • Miguel Castelo-Branco

MSc + Licentiate Degrees (Integrated Master) in Engineering Physics

Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

• Title of the Master Thesis
  • Probabilistic non-linear earthquake location in a 3–D velocity model
• The main topic of this thesis pertains to the application of an hypocenter non-linear location method to the 3–D velocity P–wave and S-wave models for SWIberia (Southwest Iberian Peninsula) plus adjacent Atlantic area of Azores and Madeira.
• Faculty Supervisor
  • João Fonseca

Tier I BrainsCAN Postdoctoral Fellow

University of Western Ontario, London ON, Canada

• My main project in this fellowship pertains to the functional mapping of the cortico-basal ganglia-cerebellar circuitry involved in the cognitive ability of forming temporal predictions during rhythmic and non-rhythmic sequences of events.
• I am also interested on the development of encoding models of cognitive tasks as means to improve functional specificity in neuroimaging and, to this end, I am studying how to combine task-fMRI data across different datasets that will allow us to improve specificity of the statistical results relative to elementary cognitive components that modulate behaviour. Concretely, I am now working on the development of individualized encoding models, suitable to be used in a fusion framework of fMRI datasets. The main goal is to perform individual parcellations on functional maps of the human brain by systematically account for inter-subject variability, through integration of group-level parcels with individual data and using a hierarchical Bayesian parcellation scheme.
• Faculty Advisor and Collaborator
  • Jessica Grahn
  • Jörn Diedrichsen

Postdoctoral Researcher

Parietal Team, Inria Saclay Centre, Paris-Saclay, France

• I was involved in the development of the Individual Brain Charting (IBC) dataset, which refers to an open-access neuroimaging initiative concerning the acquisition and analysis of multitask fMRI data for the establishment of a neurocognitive atlas of the human brain. This project is part of the Human Brain Project consortium.
  • See Pinho et al. (2018), Pinho et al. (2020), and Pinho et al. (2024).
• Because many fMRI studies are limited to one single task and only report group-average brain maps that hinder effect specificity and a fine demarcation of brain regions, I also developed an individual-functional-atlasing approach to link functional segregation of specialized brain regions to elementary mental functions, by leveraging the IBC dataset.
  • See Pinho et al. (2021).
• Advisor
  • Bertrand Thirion

• Tier I BrainsCAN Postdoctoral Fellowship, Western University (London ON, Canada)
• Amount (5y): ∼389.000 CAD

• Research fellowship, Sven and Dagmar Saléns Foundation (Stockholm, Sweden)
• Amount: ∼144.000 SEK

• Prize of The Best Poster Communication in the "Symposium Music, Poetry & The Brain - Celebrating Wagner's Bicentennial", Rectory of NOVA University Lisbon (Lisbon, Portugal)

• PhD studentship from Foundation of Science and Technology (FCT) (SFRH/BD/33895/2009) under the PHD Programme in Experimental Biology and Biomedicine of Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra (Coimbra, Portugal)
• Amount: ∼80.153 €

• Scientific initiation grant in Seismology from FCT, Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal)
• Amount: ∼3.600 €

NeuroCausal

• Contributer to NeuroCausal: “An open data sharing and metadata synthesis platform for clinical data”

Nilearn

• Contributer to Nilearn: “Statistics for NeuroImaging in Python”

IBC-analyses pipeline

• Contributer to the Repository of Public Analysis Code for the IBC Project.