First of all, thank you, dear reader, for your interest in my thesis.
This work, from preparation to start and finish, would not have been possible without the help of many people. I am deeply grateful to all of you.
Liebe Ma, lieber Pa, ich danke euch von ganzem Herzen dafür, dass ihr mein Studium ermöglicht habt und mich dabei unterstützt meine Träume wahr werden zu lassen.
Thank you, Ms. Gieseke for your teaching and for opening my mind to the possibility that I could pursue a scientific path.
I would like to thank Peter Hagoort for having founded the Donders Institute in a spirit of building bridges across borders of nations and across borders of scientific disciplines. I feel tremendously honoured by and thankful to Christian Doeller to have entrusted me with a PhD student position in his then fresh research group in a remarkably inspiring and collaborative environment. Christian, you have an outstanding talent to point out the silver lining during times of despair. You provided intense guidance, often on a daily basis. At the same time you gave me the freedom to design new research projects according to my own views. All of these characteristics are signs of great leadership.
To give some examples, our multivariate effects appeared very promising at an initial stage, but after almost a year of work they turned out to be inconclusive. My world seemed dreary. However, there were univariate effects that were just as promising, which you helped me realise. Later on, one of the most rewarding experiences of my PhD studies was to follow up on the serendipitous alignment effect with a series of experiments I could shape in my own view.
Alex, thank you for the countless times you helped me out by sharing scripts or discussing anything from graphics to the most nitty-gritty details of any project. You suggested running partial-correlation analyses to estimate functional connectivity between laminar segments, showed me how to create beautiful, transparent renderings of 3d surfaces and suggested to pursue quantifications for the triangulation hypothesis. I’ll miss your advice.
Sander, you were the first to ‘show me the Donders’. I immediately felt welcome and knew that I wanted to join the team. Thank you for the great trip to Chicago. Who would have thought we could appear more American than anybody else in the Kingston Mines?!
Jacob and Matthias, I am thrilled and filled with happiness for us going together on the ‘adventure in the north’. You are awesome. I relied on your help and advice many times. I hope that we keep exploring enchanted woods and creating beautiful science.
Lonja, Lorena, Naomi, thank you for organising dinners, movie nights, cocktail parties and other social events. I wish I had returned the favour a bit more. However, it is never too late. You are cordially invited to visit me in Norway or wherever I own a couch or a guestroom.
Oliver, thank you for using your magic to create the grid pattern for my thesis cover.
Nestor, you enabled a fruitful collaboration between the Beckmann and the Doeller group. It was a lot of fun and I am happy I could be your supervisor and paisano.
Thanks you Steffanie, Sylvie, Nynke and Branka for great scientific discussions and for contributing to a warm and social atmosphere in the Doellerlab.
Tobias, I feel super lucky to have your expert support in setting up an MEG navigation study and tweaking the eye tracker. This study is a direct continuation of the fMRI based alignment effects and your extensive help – despite being under great time pressure – is invaluable in making this project a success.
David and Laura, thank you so much for agreeing to be my paranymphs. I feel that with you two as my guardians I will be able to defend my PhD thesis with a calm mind and a joyful heart.
Thanks to my roomies, in particular Miri, Diego, Erik and Matthias, for your friendship and emotional support and being there for me whenever I was in need.
Lucia, you played a very important role for my well being during my PhD. After long ‘discussions’ with MatLab it was great to talk to you and enjoy your jokes. You are an absolutely marvellous Sinterklaas poem writer!
Tildie, thank you for providing answers to almost all of my urgent questions. To me you are both the great oracle and the great heart of the Donders.
Ayse, your cheerful smiles will accompany me once a year during our birthday. I would like to thank the Donderians in the financial department and the administration for their incredible efficiency and for keeping things run so smoothly.
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Thanks Marek, Erik, Mike, Uriel and everybody from the technical group for your terrific and efficient support that made working at the Donders so much easier.
David Norris and Peter Koopmans for providing advice on setting up laminar fMRI studies.
Tim van Mourik, thanks for your great dedication to discussions. Anytime I came with a question you took all the time to answer it in as much detail as necessary and even analysed data with me in MatLab and R.
Markus Barth, your invaluable and intense support and guidance in setting up our 7T studies in Essen was key for my PhD projects, and importantly, your positive attitude made it fun as well.
Peter Koopmans, your ground braking work on laminar fMRI and your technical advice gave me confidence to get my own project going.
Erno Herrmanns, not many people had recorded breathing and pulse signals during fMRI experiments and your scripts and advice have been of great help in cleaning my data.
Christian Beckmann (GGMFIT scripts and info), thanks for readily sharing scripts, such as for GGMFIT, and being so open for discussions and advice even when there was no direct benefit to you.
Ben, explaining me your ground work with Unreal and sharing your experiences with wrestling AA or setting up RSA analyses saved me months of time.
Sasha, I feel honoured and extremely lucky to having had intense support and guidance by you during the time when I needed it the most. Your creativity and elegance keep inspiring me.
Dearest BB, I feel forever grateful that we share this winding road. Were you foolish or were you brave to live together with a starting PhD student? What I know is that you have been seeing my own foolishness and keep on helping me to overcome it.
I deeply admire your dedication and empathy for the ones in need, the ones ignored and left behind. Let’s make our dreams come true, because your smiles are my delight and I’d like to share mine.