IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.
2016 Fellowship Recipients
Linda Boshans, Physiology & Neurobiology
Current Research: My research focuses on the neurogenic fate potential of NG2 cells, a type of glial progenitor cell. NG2 cells share a close lineage with interneurons, and through forced expression of a pro-interneuronal transcription factor, NG2 cells can be reprogrammed into neurons. Specifically, I am interested in the genetic and molecular changes that occur to produce the fate switch of NG2 cells into GABAergic neurons.
Thomas Brooks, Psychology
Current Research: I am interested in the interplay between perception, action, and cognition, particularly with regards to how sensory information creates experience. I like to take classical experimental phenomena (such as bistable perception of the Necker cube) and reconceptualize them as action-driven processes. Currently I'm studying how grasping a cube shaped object in different ways can affect which orientation of Necker cube is seen by a person.
Iris Chin, Psychology
Current Research: My research interest is in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder. I focus on four aspects of language acquisition: how do children come to acquire morphosyntax (in terms of its form and its meaning), what types of biases do children have when learning the syntax of their language, how does the acquisition of language impact other areas of cognition (i.e., theory of mind), and how do children learn about the pragmatic use of language.
Amanda Coletti, Physiology and Neurobiology
Current Research: My research focuses on characterization of stem cell niches in the developing brain. Specifically, I am examining fate decisions of stem cells that promote neurogenesis, ependymogenesis or regeneration, in the case of injury or disease. I am particularly interested in how hydrocephalus affects brain development.
Charles Davis, Psychology
Current Research: How is meaning represented in the brain? I am interested in semantic representation in language, and the neural circuits that support these representations. My current work is investigating the representation of abstract concepts, looking at the interaction of semantic and episodic memory in the processing of abstract concepts, and the role of the hippocampus in this relation. I am also interested in the distributed representation of semantic memory across sensorimotor areas of the brain (the extent to which sensory, perceptual, and motor areas are involved in processing language), and how these ideas map onto language creation and, from an evolutionary perspective, non-human communication.
Julia Drouin, Speech Language & Hearing Sciences
Current Research: I'm interested in speech perception and how listeners map from speech to meaning. That is how is the listener able to take information from the acoustic speech signal and map it onto higher linguistic units, especially given that the acoustic signal is rich in variability. I use behavioral paradigms, electrophysiology, and neuroimaging techniques to examine these questions.
Zak Ekves, Psychology
Current Research: Semantic and episodic memory integration during sentence processing, Event processing and representation, Neural correlates of event processing and semantic/episodic memory integration.
Katelyn Gettens, Psychology
Current Research: My research interests lie at the intersection of health psychology, neuropsychology, and neurophysiology. My work focuses on the neuropsychological and neurophysiological underpinnings of health behavior change. My current work examines the relationship between executive functions (verbal fluency, mental flexibility, inhibition, planning, etc.) and weight control among adult populations with overweight and obesity using behavioral, task-based neuropsychological assessment batteries.
Roman Goz, Psychology
Current Research: Epileptic spectrum disorders affects millions of people around the world. Related genetic malfunction has been found only for a very small part of those epileptic disorders.Epilepsy might also follow traumatic injury. The changes in electrophysiological properties of neuronal tissue that makes it hyper-excitable, creating a synchronous firing either in a small brain area, or that spreads to multiple brain areas, are still enigma. I'm interested in discovering the answer to that. Understanding what neuronal circuit initiate this synchronous activity, whether there is an origin in a specific cell type is the current goal.
Henry Harrison, Psychology
Current Research: Visually guided action; behavioral dynamics; action-selection; self-organization; sports science.
Kavitha Kannan, Molecular & Cellular Biology
Current Research: I am interested in studying the molecular mechanisms behind neurodegenerative disease progression using Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. My current research uses genetic tools available in Drosophila combined with cellular and molecular biology approaches to identify novel genetic modifiers that play key roles in in human neurodegenerative diseases.
Martin Lang, Anthropology
Current Research: My primary interest is ritual and effects of its various components on human behavior. I study effects of music on inter-personal coordination, synchronous movement, decision-making and social bonding. My other research line is focused on understanding the role that ritualized motor sequences might play in alleviating anxiety. I use physiological measurements, motion capture, machine-learning algorithms, and linear and nonlinear data analysis (recurrence quantification analysis).
Tommy Lee, Psychology
Current Research: Tommy Lee is interested in the mechanisms underlying learning and memory in the dorsal and ventral regions of the hippocampus. His research is interdisciplinary—integrating behavior, neuropharmacology, electrophysiology, and computational neuroscience. After completing his Ph.D. and a postdoctoral fellowship, Tommy Lee aspires to be a professor of neuroscience at a research I university to continue his research and teaching.
Natasza Marrouch, Psychology
Current Research: My primary research focuses on the processing of unpredictability. Building on interdisciplinary postulates from information theory, probability theory, and neurological findings, I explore the role of unpredictability in the formation and persistence of belief systems. To this end I apply a combination of experimental methods, computational modeling, and multilevel analysis of open-source socioeconomic, Geo-spatial data, and individual level data.
Gabriel Martinez-Vera, Linguistics
Current Research: Semantics, Morphosyntax, Syntax-Semantics Interface
Timothy Michaels, Psychology
Current Research: My research utilizes translational and interdisciplinary methods to examine the neural basis of perceptual and cognitive deficits that underlie serious mental illness. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how attention and working memory impairments relate to psychosis and contribute to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.
Glenn Milton, Molecular & Cellular Biology
Current Research: We are interested in X chromosome evolution in respect to disease, particularly Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As an epigenetics lab, we are interested in the epigenetic environment and the role it plays in gene regulation on the X chromosome. We aim to define the chromatin architecture of an X-linked imprinting control region in mice and to define expression and regulation of an ASD candidate gene in human brain tissue.
Yanina Prystauka, Psychology
Current Research: Are brain regions recruited for processing object state changes sensitive to the number of dimensions on which the change occurs? What is the effect of processing identical syntactic structures with different levels of semantic complexity on the working memory load? Do native and L2 speakers have similar mechanisms of morphosyntactic processing? I use converging evidence from psycholinguistics and syntax to study sentence processing and its neural correlates.
Russell Ritchie, Psychology
Current Research: My interests include cognitive science most broadly, language more specifically, and most specifically, language dynamics (processing, acquisition, emergence in communities, historical change, evolution in our species). I mostly investigate these dynamics in the lexicon and in prosody, using behavioral and neurophysiological experiments, corpus analysis, and computational modeling. I also maintain interests in data science and natural language processing.
Brenda Rourke, Communication
Current Research: My research is broadly focused on information processing in mediated environments for atypical populations. I am specifically interested in cognitive processing differences in mediated learning for individuals with high functioning autism and attention deficit disorders. My work draws from research in education, psychology, communication, telecommunication, engineering, and cognitive science.
Kayleigh Ryherd, Psychology
Current Research:I am interested in how an individual’s semantic representations and knowledge about concepts affect their reading comprehension ability. Specifically, I’m interested in poor comprehenders, people who show a specific impairment in language comprehension without problems in word decoding or other more general cognitive processes. I use behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies to try to understand the specific comprehension deficit in this population.
Garrett Smith, Psychology
Current Research: Sentence processing, particularly the effects meaning has on syntactic form; Nonlinear dynamics and self-organization in language and cognition; Computational modeling.