‘Try to reverse these wrong stereotypes’ – an interview with Prof Sarah Garfinkel & Dr Lisa Quadt #WomeninScience

Description

Interview published alongside review article on loneliness and social isolation from a social neuroscience perspective.

 

Subject

During the Covid-19 pandemic, with its repeated lockdowns and social restrictions, many people across the globe have reported increased feelings of isolation and loneliness. Prolonged loneliness is known to be associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes, for example increased cerebrovascular disease. What could be the mechanism underlying this association? That is the subject of a recent perspective article in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

Its authors, Dr Janine Gronewold, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Vascular Neurology and Dementia of the University Hospital Essen, and Miriam Engels, a doctoral student at the Institute of Medical Sociology at the University Clinic Düsseldorf and lecturer at the Open University of the Netherlands, were inspired by a recently proposed framework for adaptive versus maladaptive brain-body interactions. For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022 on 11th February, Gronewold (denoted as JG below) and Engels (ME) here interview two of the authors behind this framework, Dr Sarah Garfinkel (SG), professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and her postdoc Dr Lisa Quadt (LQ), a research fellow in Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton & Sussex Medical School. Here, they ask Garfinkel and Quadt about their career, their research, and what drives them.