Filippo Pasqualitto

Indicative thesis title: Music therapy for outpatients with substance use disorder: a pilot study on neurophysiological correlates of craving reduction.

Background

Supervisory team: Prof Jörg Fachner (1st), Dr Clemens Maidhof (2nd)

Filippo is a PhD student at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research (CIMTR) and his PhD project aims to investigate the ongoing neural dynamics of Music Therapy for addiction and the impact of this therapeutic approach on the short-term and long-term evaluation of several outcomes such as depressive and anxiety symptoms, cravings and perceived therapeutic alliance.

After a Bachelors degree in Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome (2017) Filippo got a Masters degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the same institution (2019). During his Masters degree, Filippo was awarded a scholarship to carry out his master thesis at Liverpool Hope University, where he spent a period of three months working on the impact of interpersonal motor interactions on body representations. In 2020 he completed a post-lauream internship in Neurobiology at Sapienza, working on addiction vulnerability/resilience in the animal model.

Research interests

• Music therapy
• Addiction
• Social neuroscience
• Neuroimaging