David defended his PhD thesis!

On March 9th, 2022 David Bestué successfully defended his PhD thesis at IDIBAPS, within the doctoral program of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona. His advisors were Rita Almeida (University of Stockholm) and Albert Compte (IDIBAPS) and the committee consisted of Ignasi Cos (University of Barcelona), Klaus Wimmer (CRM-Barcelona) and Rosanne Rademaker (ESI-Frankfurt).

David's PhD thesis was entitled "Circuit mechanisms of working memory maintenance and distractor interference". He worked on it for five years, with two full years spent at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden) for the major experimental part of his thesis under the supervision of Torkel Klingberg and Rita Almeida. In his thesis, David used computational models of cortical microcircuits to interpret the results from his own behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, in which participants were asked to remember spatial locations over a short memory interval during which distractors appeared that had to be ignored. David found that bump attractor models were remarkably able to mimic many of the patterns of interference between memories and distractors observed and based on the analysis of BOLD signals he determined that the locus of these interferences was consistent with activations measured in prefrontal cortex.

It is a proud moment for the Brain Circuits and Behavior Laboratory at IDIBAPS, and we congratulate David for this milestone achievement. As customary in our lab, his lab mates celebrated him with a humorous video where his thesis project trajectory was portrayed as wizardry training (David is an outstanding magician!). The best of luck to all your future endeavors, David!