SHISHIR
BALIYAN

My research career began during the third year of my undergraduate degree when I was awarded a fellowship to search for anti-cancer properties in cell cultures derived from indigenous trees in India. In 2012 I traveled to the EPFL in Lausanne through a research grant to investigate the factors related to the formation of social hierarchies in rats as my Master's project(TfM). Then, I began my PhD under the direction of Dr. César Venero and Dr. Carmen Sandi at UNED Madrid's Faculty of Psychology, and began working on the development of a virtual reality-based device designed to explore and quantify behavior similar to empathy in rats. During the course of my PhD, I worked on multiple projects, for example, on mice; exploration of the impact of thyroid hormones on cognitive function in aging, in rats; study the impact of social isolation in the short and long term on aging and in humans; psychosocial and biological factors in cognitive aging in older participants; and effects of dietary bioactive phospholipid supplementation on age-associated cognitive status. I finished my thesis on stress and empathy, focusing on cortisol as a predictor of the impact of stress on mental health. In 2019, I was lucky to collaborate with Prof. Cimadevilla in the exploration of virtual tasks that explore spatial working memory and in 2022 I was hired by Prof. Higuera-Matas for the exploration of the two-hit model of schizophrenia via a rat model. In my thesis I described a previously undiscovered relationship between emotional empathy and indices of HPA axis functioning in older women. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I investigated whether pre-pandemic cortisol levels could predict the negative mental health impact of the pandemic and its lockdown. To further the study of empathy, I translated and validated a state empathy test, the Pictorial Empathy Test-Spanish, and made it available for open access. I was part of the research group of Dr. Cesar Venero, COGNI-UNED and we received the UNED-Santander prize for research in 2022, I received the prize for the best symposium/oral presentation in 3 different international congresses in 2017, 2019 and 2022 and the best poster presentation award in 2016. I recently published, as co-lead author, an article detailing the relationship between cortisol and loneliness. I have co-directed 2 TfMs and received European funding during 2023-24 as a Margarita Salas investigator working with Prof. José Antonio Hinojosa at the Instituto Pluridisciplinary (UCM), applying EEG to study the underlying neuro-mechanisms of loneliness. Since April 2024 I am based at the department of psychobiology at the faculty of psychology, UNED as an assitant professor.