As a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Antonia Hamilton at UCL, Paul Forbes successfully applied for an EPS Study Visit in April 2017.
This award allowed Paul to visit the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany for three months under the supervision of Dr Leonhard Schilbach, investigating the validation of a non-invasive motion tracking system for use in autism diagnostic interviews.
Paul has told us that he enjoyed his stay in Munich and ‘learned a lot during the placement. It also cemented my decision to go abroad for my postdoc.’
The experience has also led to the publication (on August 12th 2020) of a paper entitled ‘Unobtrusive tracking of interpersonal orienting and distance predicts the subjective quality of social interactions‘, in collaboration with Juha Lahnakoski (a colleague Paul met whilst in Munich), Cade McCall and Leonhard Schilbach.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191815
Paul is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit of the University of Vienna.