Leah Banellis

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Dr. Banellis is interested in brain-body interactions involved in psychiatric symptoms, consciousness and interoception. Her work in the ECG focuses on understanding how visceral signals from the stomach and other organs influence mental health. Using a combination of electrogastrography, fMRI, and machine learning, she has demonstrated that increased coupling between the stomach’s electrical rhythm and frontoparietal brain regions indexes a dimensional signature of poorer mental health, spanning anxiety, depression, stress and well-being. Her large-scale psychophysical studies have also provided critical insights into the structure of interoceptive ability, showing that cardiac and respiratory interoception are largely independent processes.

For her PhD, she researched brain-heart interactions in healthy cognition and patients with disorders of consciousness, supervised by Dr. Damian Cruse at the University of Birmingham. Also with Dr. Cruse she completed her MSc in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience, researching electrophysiological markers of conscious speech processing. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Psychology with Human Biology at Plymouth University, with her BSc project on embodiment and meditation with Prof. Susan Blackmore.

In 2025, Leah received a Lundbeckfonden Postdoctoral Fellowship, which will take her to Dani Bassett’s lab at Yale University and enable her to expand her work into models of multi-organ brain-body interaction and neural stimulation through collaborations at Copenhagen University with Dr. Anke Karabanov and the ECG.

Leah has presented workshops on brain-body interactions and interoception at WAVES 2024, Adriatica 2025, and ASSC 2025/2023. As well as presenting symposiums at ICON 2025, and NAD 2024.

Watch Leah discuss and present gastric–brain coupling.

Read Leah’s magazine article on embodied mind-wandering and mental health.

Representative Publications