Profile

I am from Greece and I have been living in Edinburgh since 2013 and I love the weather here (I guess is what you miss??). I am doing my PhD at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. In my spare time, I like reading books (I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan), watching movies (Interstellar is my favourite) and tv-series (soo many). I love hiking and walking to places and Edinburgh is the perfect city to do that (just get a good rain coat though). I really enjoy baking and every week I try to find something that I haven’t made before, which sometimes is a hit or a miss!

My research is focused on understanding how we feel our sense of self through our body though our limbs. My work is a bit peculiar as I spend a lot of time thinking about our hands and feet. I am trying to understand how do you know that this is your body and not someone else’s? How do you know that this hand and this foot are yours? Does your ability to move your limbs, helps you remember that this is your body? What if you don’t like how your limbs look like, will that affect how you experience your body?

My PhD has 3 studies and now, I am in the middle of data collection for one of them. For that reason, I spend a couple of hours per day advertising my study. That means, I email people and send advertisements such as:

This study is online and that means that I need people to sign up and complete some tasks. For example, just to give you a taste of my “strange” topic,  in one of the tasks, I ask people to close their eyes, perform a movement with their hand or foot and I record the time that it takes for them to do the movement:

In another task, I ask people to close their eyes and pay attention to any sensations in their hands or feet. That is, those tinkling and tingly sensations that you feel on your limbs as I am trying to understand what is causing our attention to them. For that reason, a questionnaire asks people if they felt anything in their limbs, where they felt it and how strong that feeling was.

I spend my time collecting the movement times and the answers from the questionnaire and I enter them in a statistical programme, such as the SPSS, get them ready for my statistical analyses (It is not too boring as it seems when you listen to some metal music!).

I take a break for 30-45 minutes in the middle of the day for a walk around the neighbourhood and I always finish the day, listening to music and preparing my to-do list for the next day.