Navona joined the BRAIN-TO lab as a PhD student in Medical Biophysics in 2022. Previously, she completed an MSc in Medical Science at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Her research interests bridge philosophy and neuroscience, applying advanced neuroimaging and statistical methods to probe age-old questions, such as how we represent the world around us, and how it is that the brain can give rise to conscious experience. She aims to translate these insights into earlier detection and treatment of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
Navona’s PhD research focuses on the claustrum, an enigmatic subcortical structure hypothesised to play a role in consciousness but difficult to image in living humans due to its thin, sheet-like morphology. Her first project demonstrates that ultra-high field MRI at submillimetre resolution can reliably detect the claustrum, validated against the first three-dimensional histological atlas of the human claustrum derived from the BigBrain dataset (preprint). Ongoing work includes a systematic review of human claustrum MRI studies, quantification of claustral variability in cell-level histology, and joint projects with colleagues Skerdi and Shuting and external collaborators using ultra-high field MRI to develop an automated segmentation algorithm, identify data-driven subsections, and characterise structural and functional connectivity in health and disease.