Welcome Hector!
We are happy to welcome Hector Taylor as a new PhD student in BORL! Hector joined us in May, and he will be working with Felix Scholkmann on a project about synergistic potential of psychedelics and virtual reality for treatment of chronic pain. Welcome to the team, Hector! We wish you great success and look forward to the fascinating insights your research will bring.
Hector received a B.S. in Cognitive Psychology from Arizona State University in 2021. His undergraduate research work focused on how humans integrate cross-modal bodily cues to embody and interact with virtual avatars.
After a short stint as a Study Manager in clinical neurology trials in Boston, Hector joined Brown University’s Virtual Environment Navigation Lab as lab manager in 2022. There, his work centered on developing Virtual Reality experiments and computer vision pipelines to model leadership networks in human crowd behavior.
As a PhD candidate in the Psychedelic Research Group at the University of Zurich, Hector is jointly embedded in the Neurophotonics and Biosignal Processing Research Group at the University Hospital Zurich, where he collaborates on the development and application of systemic physiology-augmented functional near-infrared spectroscopy (SPA-fNIRS). His research bridges immersive virtual reality, psychedelic compounds, and neuroimaging to investigate how altered states of consciousness and embodiment illusions can be used to recalibrate body representation and alleviate chronic pain.