Monika is interested in the relationship between emotions, stress, and episodic memory. Her PhD project (Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland) focused on the role of the amygdala in encoding and reinstatement of memories related to distinct emotions – disgust and fear. During her first stay in Geneva, supervised by Prof. Patrik Vuilleumier (UNIGE), she explored in more detail the distinct effects of emotion schemas of disgust and fear on associative memory (using fMRI and pupillometry). During her first postdoc under the supervision of Prof. Lila Davachi (Columbia University, NYC, USA), her research focused on the influence of emotional brain states on subsequent learning and memory consolidation, as well as memory modulation by different neuromodulators. During a second postdoc at UNIGE, supervised by Prof. Ulrike Rimmele and Prof. Patrik Vuilleumier, she investigated how emotion affects memory for complex events in space and time, using an ecologically valid and immersive experimental setting in virtual reality. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CISA, UNIGE (supervised by Prof. Ulrike Rimmele) and SISSA, Trieste, Italy (supervised by prof. Domenica Bueti). She combines behavioural, neuroendocrine and neural measures with virtual reality and psychophysics to investigate how a stress hormone cortisol affects the way we sense and remember time.