Afroditi Papantoni

Postdoctoral Fellow

Affiliations

Postdoctoral Fellow, Monell Chemical Senses Center

Education

PhD, Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Laboratory Of

Dr. Kyle S. Burger

Research Summary

My research interests are to explore how the human brain integrates internal and external stimuli to guide eating behavior and food choices. More specifically, I am interested in understanding how brain systems that guide food-motivated behaviors can become dysregulated and lead to aberrant eating behaviors like overeating. To this end, we employ a variety of neuroimaging techniques, eye-tracking and metabolic measures to identify neurophysiological factors that can act as predictive markers for these aberrant eating behaviors.

Keywords

eating behavior, obesity, reward, learning, brain imaging, behavioral analysis

Representative Publications

Papantoni A, Gearhardt AN, Yokum S, Hoover LV, Finn ES, and Burger KS, 2025. A connectome-wide brain signature during fast food advertisement exposure predicts BMI at 2 years. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

Papantoni A, Shearrer GE, Sadler JR, Stice E, and Burger KS, 2021. Longitudinal associations between taste sensitivity, taste liking, dietary intake and BMI in adolescents. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, p.389.

Smith KR, Papantoni A, Veldhuizen MG, Kamath V, Harris C, Moran TH, Carnell S, and Steele KE, 2020. Taste- related reward is associated with weight loss following bariatric surgery. The Journal of Clinical Investigation.