Post Docs, Research Scientists and Special Faculty

I conduct research that combines social psychology, cognitive science, and behavioral neuroscience, with a substantive focus on quality of attention as it operates in personal and social domains. A particular current focus is upon mindfulness, including its phenomenology and consequences for emotion regulation, behavior regulation, and well-being. 

Senior Research Associate with expertise in fMRI. He is working on all of the fMRI projects. He has just the right computational skills to deal with the intensive data processing associated with fMRI data, as well as neuroanatomical knowledge for data interpretation. His substantive interests are in working memory, language, and spatial thinking. His Ph.D. is from the University of Missouri. He was previously an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow for two years.

My current research explores the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which scientific concepts are learned. I also developed a multiple cortical network theory of discourse processing with colleagues at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI). My broader research program focuses on the interaction of learning, language and the brain during the instructional process. I use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to study cortical networks that subserve reading and learning. I have studied these networks in English speakers, bilinguals and individuals with autism. My Ph.D. is from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and I previously worked at the Learning Research & Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

My research is concerned with understanding processes at the intersection of feature-based attention and visual working memory. More specifically, my work is primarily aimed at addressing three topics of interest:

1) The automaticity by which the maintenance of feature-based information in visual working memory biases the selection of perceptually similar inputs in the environment, and the downstream consequences that this has on other cognitive systems/processes.

​2) The extent to which attentional sets are shaped through accumulated experience (e.g., expectancies about target-distractor similarity).

3) Understanding the factors that support (or hinder) the precise representation of feature-guiding templates.

To address these topics, I employ a combined approach that involves the use of behavioral and electrophysiological measures, including event-related potentials and inverted encoding models.