Affiliates

The Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (IBACS) offers affiliate memberships to UConn faculty; current and former UConn graduate students; and researchers at partner organizations with ties to UConn. Browse our list of current affiliates below, or find out more about membership benefits and how to become an IBACS affiliate.

Groups

Faculty Affiliates

Photo	Name	Research Interests
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Music	Stefanie Acevedo	Music, School of Fine Arts	Her main research interests include musical expectation, the analysis and cognition of musical form, cognitive underpinnings for musical categorization and segmentation, and music theory pedagogy. Her work encompasses the analysis and cognition of common-practice, avant-garde, popular, and non-Western musics.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Gerry Altmann	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Adult language processing; Influence of context on sentence comprehension; Event comprehension; Interface between language and vision.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Srdjan Antic	Neuroscience, UConn Health	Research in our laboratory is centered on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of synaptic integration, neuronal excitability and plasticity, development of human neurons and how dopamine modulates these fundamental processes. Our experimental methods include optogenetics, electrophysiology, fast functional imaging using calcium-sensitive indicators or voltage-sensitive indicators, computer simulations (NEURON), neuron tracing and immunolabeling.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Robert Astur	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My interests reply on using behavioral neuroscience theory and methodology in human populations to help elucidate the neural bases of memory function. Currently, we are conducting studies examining how nicotine affects how people learn things and extinguish memories. We also are looking at how estrogen affects hippocampal sensitive memory in women. And, lastly, we are examining fear conditioning in humans in virtual reality environments in hopes of helping design effective strategies for treating anxiety.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Byoung Il Bae	Neuroscience, UConn Health	We study molecular and cellular mechanisms of cerebral cortical development using genetically engineered ferret and mouse models of human brain disorders. We are particularly interested in understanding how mutations in evolutionarily conserved, ubiquitously expressed genes cause species-, tissue-, and cell type-specific disease phenotypes. We are also interested in the neurodevelopmental basis of mammalian social behavior and autism spectrum disorder.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates		Jeremy Balsbaugh	Center for Open Research Resources & Equipment, Office of the Vice President for Research	My expertise lies in applications of ultra-high performance liquid chromatography coupled to high resolution tandem mass spectrometry for the identification and quantification of proteins, peptides, and small molecule metabolites in complex biological systems to uncover the mechanisms that underlie disease.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Haim Bar	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am an applied statistician, and my research interests include statistical modeling for high throughput data, variable selection, Bayesian and empirical Bayes methods, gene network analysis, and statistical methods in machine learning. I have collaborated with researchers from diverse fields such as genetics, nutrition, economics, and microbiology.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Philosophy	Dorit Bar-On	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Philosophy (Mind, Language, Epistemology, Metaethics); Linguistics (Semantics & Pragmatics, Evolution of Language, Animal Communication; Cognitive Science & Psychology (Theory of Mind, Failures of Self-Knowledge, Perception, Action, Rationality, Inner Speech, Emotions, Self-Deception)
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Communication	Saraswathi Bellur	Communication, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Dr. Bellur’s research explores the psychological and physiological effects of interactive media on key communication outcomes. Her research has focused on explication and measurement issues related to interactivity, cognitive heuristics and user engagement. Dr. Bellur looks forward to pursuing interdisciplinary projects on communication technologies and their effects.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Alaina Brenick	Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Dr. Brenick's research focuses on how children, adolescents, and adults experiences, make sense of, reason about, and respond to bias-based victimization. From a social justice perspective, she examines individual and group social and moral reasoning regarding interpersonal and systemic oppression and inequities. Furthermore, she designs and evaluates programmatic prevention and intervention measures to reduce intergroup conflict, discrimination, and inequity.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Preston Britner	Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include the study of child-parent relationships and the application of family science research to applied settings. As an attempt to bridge family science and neuroscience research, I am interested in exploring neurobiological substrates of interpersonal relationships from an affective neuroscience perspective using neuroimaging modality.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Alice Burghard	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My research covers the physiology and pathophysiology of the central auditory system with a special focus on the circuitry of the inferior colliculus, a major hub in auditory subcortical processing. I am especially interested how changes in this circuit contribute to tinnitus and other central auditory processing disorders. Methodologies include electrophysiology and behavioral assessments in animal models with and without tinnitus.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Nursing	Sharon Casavant	Nursing, School of Nursing	My research interests focus on the effects of repeated painful/stressful procedures in preterm infants within the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Research has demonstrated that those experiences alter DNA methylation, gene expression and possibly telomere length. Our research question is whether there are associations between those epigenetic changes and infant neurodevelopment.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Sociology	Noel Cazenave	Sociology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the social impact of awakening experiences, altered states of consciousness, and what appears to an emerging "psychedelic revolution" with a particular focus on what they bring to our understanding of human nature and possibilities.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Chi-Ming Chen	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My lab is interested in translating neurophysiological knowledge into interventions for neurological and psychiatric disorders. We are interested in conducting research that will aid in developing and translating advanced neurophysiological knowledge into novel treatments for medication-resistant schizophrenia. Specifically, we hope to test interventions and new chemical compounds to ameliorate pathological neural oscillations in schizophrenia.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Ming-Hui Chen	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include Big Data, Bayesian Statistical Methodology, Bayesian Computation, Bayesian Phylogenetics, Categorical Data Analysis, Design of Bayesian Clinical Trials, DNA Microarray Data Analysis, Meta-analysis, Missing Data Analysis (EM, MCEM, and Bayesian), Monte Carlo Methodology, Statistical Methodology and Analysis for Prostate Cancer Data, Statistical Modeling, Survival Data Analysis, and Variable Selection.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering	Yongku Cho	Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, College of Engineering	My research group develops engineered proteins to detect and control biological processes. We are currently focusing on engineering antibodies specific to protein post-translational modifications that can be used as biomarkers of neurodegeneration.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	James Chrobak	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on the physiology and function of hippocampal circuits with particular emphasis on neural network dynamics (e.g., theta and gamma oscillations) which support the transient formation and synchronization of neuronal ensembles across brain structures. Studies in my laboratory typically involve anatomical analyses, neurophysiological recordings of awake-behaving rodents and assessment of "episodic" (delayed conditional discrimination) memory performance.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Carl Coelho	Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	A main focus of my research is to gain a better understanding of how diffuse and focal brain damage disrupts language processes such as discourse. Studying language at the level of discourse permits the examination of both linguistic and cognitive influences and how these components are integrated for successful social interactions.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Joanne Conover	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	The overarching goal of my research program is to understand properties of the brain's stem cell niches, their potential for stem cell-mediated reparative functions, and the use and application of these findings to model and understand human disease. Currently, we combine 3D modeling of brain structures with detailed tissue histochemistry to generate longitudinal maps of gross structural changes at the cellular level. Projects include both animal models and human MR data and tissue, and focus on: (1) injury (concussion, traumatic brain injury), disease (fetal hydrocephalus, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and aging.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Linguistics\|Psychological Sciences	Marie Coppola	Psychological Sciences and Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research program centers on how language emerges within individuals and communities, as well as how atypical language experiences affect cognitive development. I study a new Deaf community sign language that emerged in Nicaragua in the 1970s and homesigners (deaf individuals who have not had the opportunity to acquire a conventional language). My latest project investigates the impact of language experience on the development of number concepts in deaf and hard of hearing children in the US.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Genetics and Genome Sciences	Justin Cotney	Genetics and Genome Sciences, UConn Health	My lab is interested in understanding the role of non-coding regulatory sequences in controlling embryonic development. We are particularly interested in identifying sequences that when either mutated or inappropriately activated lead to developmental abnormalities such as cleft lip and/or palate as well as neurodevelopmental disorders.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Stephen Crocker	Neuroscience, UConn Health	The Crocker lab has been studying the roles of non-myelinating glia (astrocytes and microglia) in demyelinating diseases of the central nervous system. Specific projects include study on neural progenitor cells derived from patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells from multiple sclerosis patients, the role of microglia in globoid cell leukodystrophy and the influence of exosome signaling on astrocyte biology and autoimmunity.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Kimberly Cuevas	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My laboratory examines the ontogeny of basic and higher-order cognitive skills during infancy and early childhood. Our work combines neuroscience and biopsychosocial perspectives, emphasizing connections between animal and human literature. Our primary research interests fall into three main themes: experimental investigation of early learning and memory; longitudinal and individual difference analysis of emerging executive functions; and neuroscience foundations of socio-cognitive development.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Dipak Dey	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests are Bayesian Analysis, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Computational Statistics, Medical Image Processing, Statistical Shape Analysis, and Statistical Genetics. My current research is on Harnessing Big Data through Statistical Modeling.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	James Dixon	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My colleagues and I work on fundamental issues in perception, action, and cognition. The overarching goal of our research program is to understand behavior as a natural extension of self-organizing systems. A foundational premise of our work is that all biological systems run on multi-scale, nested architectures that are intrinsically non-decomposable.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Electrical and Computer Engineering	Abhishek Dutta	Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering	My research interest lies in solving practical problems in large scale mechatronic and biological systems by developing mathematical analysis based on stochastic and robust optimization, constrained control and machine learning.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Mathematics	Damir Dzhafarov	Mathematics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research is in computability theory and reverse mathematics, which are subfields of mathematical logic. Among the general questions I am interested in are how mathematicians prove the theorems they prove, what the limits are to what can be proved, and to what degree proofs can be generated algorithmically. More specifically, I try to variously describe the complexity of theorems and proof techniques (which may be regarded as methods of reasoning) from different parts of mathematics, and areas outside of mathematics like cognitive science, and look for connections between them.
Administration\|Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Inge-Marie Eigsti	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research addresses a fundamental issue in human cognition: how constraints imposed by brain development and core neurocognitive processes impact language acquisition. As a scientist, I am intrigued by the interaction of language acquisition and brain development. As a clinician, I am motivated to understand the puzzles presented by atypical development, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its consequences, because of what they mean for intervention. We use multiple converging approaches in my lab: experimental behavioral tasks, structural and functional imaging, and eyetracking, in our research.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Betty Eipper	Neuroscience, UConn Health	I am interested in the synthesis, storage and secretion of neuropeptides. In addition to studying the enzymes unique to neuropeptide synthesis, I study the formation and exocytosis of the secretory granules that store these neuropeptides. We use primary neuronal cultures, neuroendocrine cell lines and genetically engineered mice to study this process.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering\|Electrical and Computer Engineering	Monty Escabi	Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering	Humans can easily recognize a familiar voice, identify a musical tune, or segregate a single speaker in a crowded room. Yet these seemingly simple tasks present major challenges to our most sophisticated computers. I study the central auditory system in mammals to understand how the brain encodes and recognizes natural sounds including speech. Our lab employs neural recordings in the auditory midbrain and cortex and neural models to understand the neural basis for sound recognition.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Holly Fitch	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Rodent models of developmental disability and neonatal brain injury and developmental disability; Modulating effects of hormones and experience; Neuroprotection
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Materials Science and Engineering	Pu-Xian Gao	Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering	Materials Science and Nanotechnology for Energy, Environmental, and Biomedical Applications; Sensors; Catalysis; Brain-machine Interface; In-situ/Operando Characterization
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Adrian Garcia-Sierra	Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	"Over the past 10 years my research has focused on the influence of language on the perception of speech sounds from infancy through young adulthood, investigating cross-cultural speech perception in native speakers of Spanish and English and cross-language speech perception in bilingual individuals. My primary research method is electrophysiology. However, I also employ behavioral and naturalistic paradigms and describe the results of my research across the lifespan from perceptual development. "
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Alexandra Garr-Schultz	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Dr. Garr-Schultz’s research explores the ways in which our identities and understanding of ourselves shapes the ways we navigate the world, with an emphasis on social dynamics affecting individuals from underrepresented or marginalized groups. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to identify ways to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and justice and to reduce social inequalities across contexts
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Genetics and Genome Sciences	Noelle Germain	Genetics and Genome Sciences, UConn Health	My research uses human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to model and investigate the genetic and molecular mechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders. Our overarching goal is to use these in vitro neuronal models to help in the identification of novel therapeutic targets and the testing of candidate drugs in disease-relevant human cell types.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering	Krystyna Gielo-Perczak	Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering	"As a biomedical engineer, I'm involved in design of biomedical devices and interested in multidisciplinary approach to human centered design, rehabilitation, human-robot and exoskeleton interactions for the purpose of augmenting human capabilities, assisting disabled persons, increasing human performance and safety. The methodology brings many disciplines in its study of humans and their environments, including biomechanics, neuroscience, systems view, physiology and psychology. "
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Music	Daniel Goldberg	Music, School of Fine Arts	I study culture, cognition, and performance of musical meter and rhythm, using methods including timing measurements, experiments, interviews, and participant observation. My recent work focuses on meters with unequal durations in Bulgarian folk music and dance.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Linguistics	Corina Goodwin	Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I study language development in three different populations of children: (1) monolingual Deaf children acquiring American Sign Language [ASL] (2) ASL-English bilinguals with normal hearing and (3) ASL-English bilinguals with cochlear implants. I am currently developing measures that could help distinguish between language difference and disorder in these populations.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Philosophy	Lewis Gordon	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include Africana Philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Aesthetics and Philosophy in Film, Literature, and Music, Philosophy of Culture, Race, and Racism, Philosophy of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis, and Global Southern Thought.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Amy Gorin	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Weight loss and maintenance, health behavior change.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Sarah Gray	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Dr. Gray is a licensed clinical psychologist whose research examines the developmental consequences of trauma and early life adversity, with a specific focus on intergenerational processes. She takes a multilevel approach, integrating narrative, behavioral, and physiological measurement to understand how risk and resilience is transmitted across generations through behavioral and biological pathways, situated in relational and broader social contexts.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Philosophy	Mitchell Green	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My work is primarily in the pragmatics of communication, focusing on the mechanisms by which speakers mean more (or sometimes less) than what they say. As such I have done work on implicature, speech act theory, presupposition, the kinematics of conversation, and expressive behavior. I also have interests in empathy, the evolution of communication, and the epistemic value of literature.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Bernard Grela	Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include examining processing based deficits in children with language impairments. These consist of assessing production errors associated with increasing linguistic complexity in children with specific language impairment and Down syndrome, and communicative deficits associated with ASD. I also look at language deficits and reading disorders in both children and adults.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Xingche Guo	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include reinforcement learning for characterizing human reward-based behavior, statistical and machine learning for neuroimaging data such as fMRI and EEG, functional data analysis, variable selection, and Bayesian analysis.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Linda Halgunseth	Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My first and primary research interest is to examine sociocultural influences on parenting, parent-child relationships, and child development. My second research interest is to develop culturally grounded self-report parenting measures. My third area of research is translational in that it identifies evidence-based practices for engaging culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse families in educational settings.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Kinesiology	Steven Harrison	Kinesiology, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	My research examines both the basic and applied science of human perception and action. My research on human perception focuses on the role of haptic perception in human tool use and navigation. My research on human action examines human abilities to person rhythmic coordinated movements and to control the postures of their body.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Fumiko Hoeft	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I have theoretical interests in the neurobiological mechanisms underlying individual differences in brain maturational processes, acquisition of skills such as literacy and how they interact.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	English	Patrick Hogan	English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I work principally at the intersection of cognitive science and literary study, examining such topics as the nature of aesthetic response, the operation of simulation in authors and readers, the ways in which literary study can advance our understanding of emotion, the political psychology of social identity (e.g., national identity) as it relates to narrative structure, and the existence and variety of narrative universals.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Xiangyou Hu	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My lab focuses on Alzheimer's research. We use Bace1 conditional knockout mice and AD mice models to investigate BACE1 physiological functions and the roles of BACE1 in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Alexander Jackson	Physiology & Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Research in the laboratory is focused on the cellular and synaptic neurophysiology of neural circuits in the mammalian hypothalamus that regulate fundamental behavioral states such as sleep, arousal and feeding. Techniques are centered on using patch-clamp electrophysiology and pharmacology in brain slices in order to elucidate the cellular and synaptic properties of specific hypothalamic cell-types and their local and long-range synaptic connectivity. This approach is carried out in concert with a toolbox of neuroanatomical methods, optogenetic strategies to manipulate the excitability of genetically targeted neurons and through collaborative work, single-cell transcriptional profiling.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates\|Staff		Gitte Joergensen	IBACS, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in how we represent different dimensions of events during language processing. More specifically, I am interested in how changes in time, and state are processed and integrated into current event representations. For example, in sentences like “The woman will drop the ice cream. But first, she will look at the ice cream”, we must maintain two distinct representations of the ice cream - before and after it was dropped. But how do these representations interact as language unfolds?
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Molecular and Cell Biology	Kavitha Kannan	Molecular and Cell Biology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	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.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Arielle Keller	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My interdisciplinary research program investigates how the human brain focuses attention on goal-relevant information amid constant distractions, with applications in understanding mental health and neurodevelopment. We leverage multimodal human neuroimaging techniques (e.g. EEG and fMRI), novel behavioral assessments, and computational models across both large-scale datasets and deeply phenotyped samples.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neurosurgery	Brian Kelley	Neurosurgery, UConn Health	I study mechanisms of diffuse axonal injury (DAI) in a pre-clinical model of diffuse brain injury (DBI). Translational research efforts focus on understanding DBI-mediated axonal injury pathobiology and related neuroinflammatory responses as well as therapeutic strategies designed to mitigate secondary mechanisms of brain injury.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Pharmaceutical Sciences	Debra Kendall	Pharmaceutical Sciences, UConn School of Pharmacy	My research goal is to understand the structure and function of the cannabinoid receptor family (CB1 and CB2). CB1 is highly expressed in the CNS while CB2 is more common in peripheral tissues. My recent work includes examining the allosteric modulation of CB1 and my laboratory has identified examples of allosteric ligand biased signaling via G protein independent pathways.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Ji Chul Kim	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I study the perceptual organization of musical structures by building computational models of music cognition and auditory neural processing. I am interested in the organizational principles of pitch and rhythmic structures, such as tonality and meter, and seek to explain them as dynamic pattern formation in neural systems embedded in musical environments.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Kinesiology	Jeffrey Kinsella-Shaw	Kinesiology, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	My research interests include applications of non-linear dynamical methods to motor control; rehabilitation science and regenerative medicine, neurological rehabilitation assessments and interventions (e.g. TMS, exercise prescription, etc.) for patients surviving stroke or TBI, or with diagnoses of progressive neurological disorders e.g. multiple sclerosis or affective disorders, e.g. Major Depressive Disorder
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Nursing	Steve Kinsey	Nursing, UConn School of Nursing	I am a biomedical researcher with specialized training in behavioral neuroscience, immunology, and pharmacology. My students and I research the effects of stress and drugs on pain, inflammation, and emotion. My goal is to apply pain and drug dependence research approaches to find new opioid-sparing pain treatments.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Brain Imaging Research Core (BIRC)	Nabin Koirala	Brain Imaging Research Core (BIRC)	My interest is in understanding network level neural perturbation in different Neurodevelopmental, Neurological and Neuropsychological disorders and develop disease specific brain biomarkers. I am currently working on exploring the neural correlates of speech, hearing and language related disorders with the use of multi-modal brain imaging and electrophysiological data and utilizing the state-of the-art frameworks of complex network algorithm.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Lynn Kuo	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Biostatistics and Bioinformatics: specifically, survival analysis, longitudinal data analysis, multivariate analysis, functional data analysis, multilevel modeling, meta-analysis, experimental design, computational biology, Bayesian phylogenetics, analysis of omic (genomic, proteomic, and next generation sequence) data which includes visualization of data, statistical learning, dimension reduction, marker detection, test validation, multiple hypothesis testing, and prediction.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Pediatrics	Shabnam Lainwala	Pediatrics, UConn School of Medicine	I am most interested in early nutrition of a preterm infant and long term health outcomes of prematurely born children. I am the director of the Regional Neonatal Neurodevelopmental Follow-Up Program at CT Children’s Medical Center. Currently, in collaboration with professors at UCONN health center, I am principal investigator (PI) or co- investigator on multiple projects that are directly aligned with my core interests of long term neurodevelopmental outcomes.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Nicole Landi	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on a language and reading development in typically developing children and adolescents, and in children with complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including dyslexia, SLI and autism. In my work I use multiple methodologies including fMRI, sMRI, EEG, ERP eyetracking & genetic analyses to explore the underlying etiology of typical and atypical language and reading processes.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Clifton Langdon	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I study the effects of acquiring language in different modalities (i.e. tactile, visual, and aural) and later onset of first language exposure. This work seeks to address the question: How are the different components of the language neural network working in concert to give rise to the ability to learn and process language and reading?
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Ed Large	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research areas include nonlinear dynamical systems, auditory neuroscience, and music psychology. I use theoretical modeling in conjunction with behavioral, comparative, neurophysiological and neuroimaging techniques to understand how people respond to complex, temporally structured sequences of sound such as music and speech.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Eric Levine	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My laboratory studies synaptic modulation in the hippocampus and cortex of the mammalian brain, focusing on the roles of endogenous cannabinoids and nerve growth factors in various forms of synaptic plasticity that are important for learning and memory. We are also using patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) lines to study the pathophysiology of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Genetics & Genome Sciences	Yuanhao James Li	Genetics & Genome Sciences, UConn Health	The long-term goal of my research program is to understand the developmental biology of the central nervous system, particularly the cerebellum. I have established and maintained a long-standing research program studying how interplays between intrinsic and extrinsic factors control cell fate specification and cell differentiation. While we use mouse genetics as the primary research approach, our studies are augmented by complementary studies in chick, embryonic stem cells, and transcriptomics.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Linguistics	Diane Lillo-Martin	Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research investigates the nature of language and its acquisition by studying American Sign Language (ASL), the acquisition of ASL by Deaf children, bimodal bilingual acquisition of ASL and spoken English by hearing children in Deaf-parented families, and the acquisition of English by hearing children. I am especially interested in how the study of sign languages can contribute to broadening understanding of what is universal and what is modality-specific.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Caitlin Lombardi	Human Development & Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research examines the roles of family, early child care, school and community for promoting children’s cognitive and social-emotional development, particularly in the context of economic and social disadvantages. One focus of this work is on the development of mathematics and spatial skills over childhood, seeking to understand the role of individual characteristics and environmental influences in order to identify opportunities for intervention
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Agnieszka Lukomska	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My research interests include the study of novel approaches to central nervous system regeneration, especially axon regeneration after injury. My other research interests focus around understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in neuroplasticity, neurotoxicity, and oxidative stress-induced changes in neural tissues.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Philosophy	Michael Lynch	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Representation, truth, consciousness, understanding and science communication
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Xin-Ming Ma	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My research interest is to understand the molecular mechanisms of dendritic spine formation and the dendritic spine pathology underlying psychiatric disorders including depression and schizophrenia. We use primary neuronal cultures, human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived neurons from schizophrenic patients and animal models of depression to study the mechanisms.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Akshay Maggu	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research is aimed at understanding the intersectional effects of auditory, cognitive, and linguistic processing on speech and language perception and learning in the brain. Using behavioral, electrophysiological, and training-based techniques, my research employs paradigms that are geared toward the understanding of both typical and impaired perceptual systems.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	James Magnuson	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Neurobiology and psychology of language, processing, development, and disorders of spoken and written language; Computational models as theory-building tools; Developing comprehensive understanding of language and learning over the lifespan from cognitive, neural and genetic perspectives through interdisciplinary collaborations; Science communication
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychiatry	Kevin Manning	Psychiatry, UConn Health	My work focuses on the neurobiology and clinical expression of late-life depression syndromes. To date, my research has focused on the identification of executive dysfunction and neuroticism as behavioral predictors of poor antidepressant treatment response and cognitive decline in late-life depression. My colleagues and I are currently working on understanding whether novel treatments (e.g., computerized cognitive training) improve depression in older adults.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Etan Markus	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Memory formation, hippocampal processing, rats, electrophysiology and neurobiology of aging
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	David Martinelli	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My research focus is on synaptic adhesion proteins, which bind two neurons together at a synapse and are at the junction of our genes and experiences. My goal is to understand the molecular logic of how these proteins orchestrate synaptic formation, modification, and function, and to ultimately provide an explanation for how these events influence behaviors.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Karen Menuz	Physiology & Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My lab studies the mechanisms supporting robust responses to odors in the insect olfactory system. Currently, we are interested in how the molecular and cellular environment surrounding olfactory neurons influences their activity, and ultimately odor-driven behaviors. We take advantage of the tremendous number of genetic tools available in the fruit fly Drosophila in order to identify conserved molecules and mechanisms that likely have a similar role in insect vectors of human disease.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Genetics and Genome Sciences	William Mohler	Genetics and Genome Sciences, UConn Health	Focusing on the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, I use advanced imaging/analysis techniques to understand the origins of order within a developing brain. My current work correlates anatomical intermediates and final structure of the nervous system with published work on molecular and physiological relationships among specific sets of neurons and muscles. Moreover, my family history and genetics give me unique real-life experience in behavioral health and autism-spectrum disorders.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Jennifer Mozeiko	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Research in the Aphasia Rehab Lab is focused on the optimization of aphasia rehabilitation. Specifically, we are looking at how clinicians can manipulate the neuroplastic response to treatment for the best possible language outcomes. Dosage, durability of treatment over time and generalization of gains to discourse production are predominant themes in much of our work.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Dan Mulkey	Physiology & Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	The focus of my research is centered on the electrophysiological characteristics of mammalian neurons in brainstem regions associated with respiratory control, specifically defining properties unique to respiratory chemoreceptors. I am also interested in the cellular mechanisms by which chemoreceptors sense changes in CO2/pH.
Administration\|Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences\|Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Emily Myers	Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research program focuses on the neural and behavioral mechanisms that enable listeners to map the speech signal onto meaning. In this program of study, I use neuroimaging techniques, principally fMRI, to investigate how the brain responds to acoustic variation within and between categories, and behavioral methods to probe the mechanisms that allow for parsing the speech stream into meaningful categories. These questions are applied to typical populations as well as to individuals with acquired language disorders (aphasia) or developmental language disorders (reading disorder, language impairment).
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Letitia Naigles	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests target the roles of environment and biology in the question of how children acquire their first language. I investigate environmental effects via studies of typical children learning a wide range of languages (e.g., Chinese, Turkish, Spanish). I investigate biological effects via studies of children with a neurodevelopmental disorder called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I frequently rely on a method called Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL), which reveals fine details of young children's language comprehension. I am beginning research to link up children's language processing and neural structure and function.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Mechanical Engineering	Thanh Duc Nguyen	Mechanical Engineering, UConn College of Engineering	Nerve regeneration, nerve stimulation/engineering and neuronal mechanics.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Akiko Nishiyama	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	The role of glial cells (non-neuronal) in the neural network.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Communication	Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch	Communication, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on the use of digital technologies for communication, information sharing, and learning. Specific areas of research include how people engage with news content on social media, the role of online social networks in health, and the use of social media for science communication.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Douglas Oliver	Neuroscience, UConn Health	We study the neural circuits in the auditory system and the changes in the brain imposed by tinnitus and hearing loss. The CNS reacts to changes in the ear, and this leads to plastic changes in the central auditory system. Understanding these plastic changes is a key to providing new therapy. Recently, we have discovered neurons that fire for minutes after the offset of a long duration sound. This unusual form of plasticity may be related to tinnitus and the perception of a phantom sound.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Linnaea Ostroff	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on how changes in synapse structure and synaptic connectivity underlie emotional learning, particularly learning to differentiate safety from danger. Brain circuits converging on the amygdala mediate responses to threatening stimuli, and my work combines serial electron microscopy reconstruction with behavioral experiments, genetic markers, and immunohistochemistry to investigate the circuit and synaptic basis of learning in the amygdala
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Flora Oswald	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on understanding how people with marginalized identities perceive and experience their social worlds. I use a wide variety of qualitative, quantitative, research synthesis, and vision-based approaches to address my research questions.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Molecular and Cell Biology	Michael O’Neill	Molecular and Cell Biology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My lab is investigating the hypothesis that the well-recognized 4:1 male bias in Autism Spectrum Disorder may be due to parent-specific epigenetic signatures on the X chromosome. We were the first to identify parent-specific gene expression, a.k.a genomic imprinting on the X chromosome in mice, and have focused recent efforts on understanding the mechanism of imprinting of these genes, their function during neurodevelopment, and the potential for misregulation of the human orthologs of these genes
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Molecular and Cell Biology	Rachel O’Neill	Molecular and Cell Biology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	The development of genome-scale sequence data and novel next generation sequencing (NGS) applications has provided a foundation for studying biological processes in targeted species; in my lab, we capitalize on using NGS approaches and chromosomics to compare the genomes of different species and different genomes across human disease states, affording a greater understanding of genome evolution and the functional elements dispersed among coding and non-coding regions.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Cell Biology	Joel Pachter	Cell Biology, UConn Health	The major focus of my lab is the role(s) of the CNS barriers, e.g., blood-brain barrier and blood-CSF barrier, in physiology and pathophysiology. As these barriers are fundamental to maintaining CNS homeostasis, even subtle disruptions in their function can lead to marked neurobiolological and cognitive changes. CNS barriers are also a main regulator of drug delivery, and so are major determinants in the efficacy and toxicity of drug action in the brain.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Alexandra Paxton	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I take a data-rich approach to capture the many ways in which our language, movement, decisions, and emotions change during social contact in laboratory and real-world settings. Understanding how conversational goals, social connections, and physical spaces shape our emerging behaviors is a primary goal of my research, embedded within rich traditions of dynamical and ecological perspectives. Recently, I have also become interested in exploring social behaviors in non-human systems.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates		Diane Quinn	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciencese	Prof. Quinn focuses on the experiences of members of stigmatized groups, self-related cognitions, behavior, and affect. She has examined how identity related constructs determine psychological and health related outcomes for people with socially stigmatized identities. She has focused on issues related to mental illness, gender stereotypes, self-objectification, and the stigma of overweight.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Nairán Ramírez-Esparza	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am a social psychologist and my research aims to answers questions about how culture and language influence personality, behavior, and health. In order to answer these questions, I use multiple methodological approaches, including digital recording devices, text analytic tools, and brain measures.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Heather Read	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research examines the neurobiology underlying the ability to discriminate and categorize vocalizations at the single neuron, neural circuit and behavioral levels. In addition to developing comprehensive theories for how biological systems discriminate social communications, we aim to develop new strategies for speech recognition, prosthetic hearing devices and diagnosis of central auditory processing disorders
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Scott Rich	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My lab uses a wealth of computational tools in research focused on improving our understanding of how experimentally characterized sources of heterogeneity and diversity in the brain contribute to physiologically relevant brain function and, conversely, how observed disruptions to this variability might promote a range of neuropathologies.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Ronald Rohner	Human Development & Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	As author of interpersonal acceptance-rejection theory, my research for past six decades focused on the effects, causes, and correlates of interpersonal acceptance-rejection. Included in this this work is an interest in the neurobiological and genetic substrates underlying universal response-tendencies to the experience of interpersonal rejection by significant others. In particular, I am interested in the neural correlates of adults’ remembrances of parental acceptance-rejection in childhood.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Philosophy	Marcus Rossberg	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses mainly on logic and the philosophies of mathematics and language. Proof-theoric inferentialist approaches to logic and higher-order logic, in particular, are a focus of my work.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Jay Rueckl	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I use behavioral methods, neuroimaging, and computational modeling to study reading and reading acquisition. I study individual differences within and across language populations and typical and atypical development to understand how the organization of the reading system is shaped by the properties of the writing system. I am also interested in the role of domain-general learning and memory mechanisms (e.g. declarative and procedural memory, statistical learning) in reading acquisition.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Beth Russell	Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I study the development of self-control from birth through early adulthood. Many of my research experiences with infancy and early childhood samples demonstrates that the executive function skills used to regulate parent-infant interactions are teachable, and that improving parent self-regulation is a skill set that serves to support positive parent-child interactions throughout childhood. Given the importance of self control for group learning contexts and its significant enduring associations with adaptive outcomes into adulthood, elaborating on the contributing factors to children’s self control is warranted. Later in the lifespan, research on youth engaged in risk behaviors suggests that emotion regulation is a key outcome which fosters youths’ capacities to face contextual/social and biological challenges and respond to obstacles in adaptive rather than maladaptive ways. Such contextual/social and biological challenges include peer influence and parents’ history of substance use, as well as adolescent impulsivity and poor distress tolerance -- these are each significantly associated with adolescent substance use. Much of my research focuses with these older samples on risk trajectories for adolescent substance use, in particular examining impulsivity and inhibitory control as outcomes from a range of recovery programs.
Administration\|Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	John Salamone	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Psychopharmacology and drug development; Neurochemistry, signal transduction, and behavior; Behavioral functions of dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, and adeenosine; Animal models of Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, fatigue
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering	Sabato Santaniello	Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering	My laboratory develops modeling and analysis tools to understand the effects of neural disorders on the brain’s electrophysiology, from single units to neural populations. We also focus on designing control algorithms for adaptive, robust, optimal neural prostheses, with application to Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, deep brain stimulation, and brain-computer interface. One ongoing project aims to develop algorithms for automatic localization of the epileptogenic onset zone and seizure onset detection in drug-resistant epileptic patients. Another ongoing project aims to understand the role of stimulation-elicited resonant effects in the motor striatum in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Pharmaceutical Sciences	Gregory Sartor	Pharmaceutical Sciences, UConn School of Pharmacy	My research interests include: animal models of drug addiction, behavioral pharmacology, epigenetics, cell
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Natale Sciolino	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Our research focuses on defining the connectivity and function of brain circuits that regulate motivational processes related to feeding and reward. We utilize intersectional genetic and optical imaging approaches with the goal to provide future treatments for obesity and psychiatric disorders, such as addiction and anxiety.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Erika Skoe	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research examines how the human central auditory system encodes complex, naturalistic sounds (speech, music) across the lifespan. I am particularly interested in how environmental enrichment and impoverishment affect this encoding process, and then ultimately how the fidelity of sound encoding affects language development and cognitive flexibility.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	William Snyder	Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	William Snyder is a specialist in linguistic theory. His research focuses on the mechanisms of language acquisition in children. A key feature of his work is the Principles-and-Parameters approach, which connects the language acquisition process in children to the patterns of grammatical variation that we see across different languages of the world.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Tammie Spaulding	Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research is focused on maximizing our ability to accurately diagnose specific language impairment in early childhood in order to provide early and optimal interventions to remediate the deficits that children with language impairment encounter. My secondary line of investigation is focused on understanding the cognitive difficulties associated with specific language impairment in order to improve our theoretical understanding of the nature of this disorder and to determine how such deficits impede the language learning process.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Timothy Spellman	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My primary research focus is elucidating the neural circuitry underlying executive function. Most of my work focuses on the prefrontal cortex and interconnected brain regions, and many of our experiments involve in vivo imaging and cell-specific modulation of neuronal activity in mice performing complex cognitive tasks.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Kinesiology	Sudha Srinivasan	Kinesiology, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	My interests lie in understanding links between sub-systems over the course of development including motor-cognitive, motor-social, and motor-communication links. I am also interested in developing multi-system, engaging rehabilitation interventions/assistive technologies that can improve the lives of people with neuro-developmental disabilities and assess the impact of these therapies on neuroplasticity and functional outcomes.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Ian Stevenson	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My long term research goals focus on understanding how information is represented and processed in the brain - both at the level of individual neurons as well as the nervous system as a whole. In collaboration with electrophysiologists, my lab uses and develops machine learning methods to understand how populations of neurons interact and adapt, and, using behavioral experiments, we develop probabilistic models of human perception and behavior. Our current research and immediate plans revolve around two broad themes: 1) modeling neural dynamics, interactions, and adaptation and, 2) linking neural data with perception, behavior, and learning. These modeling efforts should ultimately allow us to move beyond traditional stimulus-response models of single neurons and, instead, characterize how neural interactions and dynamics give rise to network activity and behavior.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Umay Suanda	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests lie at the intersection of early cognitive, language and social development. My lab studies the real-time dynamics of toddlers’ language learning environment, how toddlers and their parents shape that environment, and the cognitive and socio-cognitive mechanisms underlying toddlers’ learning.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Whitney Tabor	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Humans seem to work best when they balance their need for order with their need for wildness. I've come to this via the study of language structure (theory of syntax), on the one hand, and language change (grammaticalization) and processing (psycholinguistics), on the other. These days, I'm also studying group coordination. I try to clarify ideas via mathematics and modeling at the intersection of the theory of computation and dynamical systems (e.g., neural networks).
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Geoffrey Tanner	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on dietary therapies for neurological disease. Using Drosophila fruit flies as a model system, we study specifically how diet interacts with neuronal excitability and cell survival to prevent onset or to ameliorate symptoms of prevalent conditions such as epilepsy, CTE, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Rachel Theodore	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Our research examines the perceptual mechanisms that support language comprehension. We focus on the degree to which language comprehension is shaped by input in the environment, both with respect to perceptual learning in end-state representations as well as plasticity underlying acquisition of speech sound categories in development. We consider these questions using a variety of experimental paradigms including behavioral psychophysics, fMRI, EEG, and computational methods.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Ephraim Trakhtenberg	Neuroscience, UConn Health	Several species of lower vertebrates have the capacity to regenerate and repair the injured central nervous system (CNS). However, in mammals the ability for CNS self-repair is lost during maturation. My goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms of neuronal development and regeneration, and to utilize gained knowledge in developing translational approaches for repairing injured CNS circuits.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Sebnem Tuncdemir	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My lab studies the circuit mechanisms that underlie memory discrimination for adaptive, flexible behaviors in health and disease. We apply novel technologies to target, monitor and control genetically identified neural networks in the hippocampus region using mouse models.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Anastasios Tzingounis	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My interest is to reveal the mechanisms by which ion channels and associated molecules and signaling networks control excitability in the neonatal and infantile brain. My lab addresses this question using a multidisciplinary approach that combines electrophysiology, pharmacology and microscopy in genetically modified mice lines that we have developed. Much of my work has dissected the cell-type and brain-region specific effects that potassium channel genes have on neuronal physiology. Going forward, I will continue to study the role of ion channels, expanding my research into their role in controlling neuronal firing rates at the single and population level.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Linguistics	Harry van der Hulst	Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My primary research interest is 'phonology', the study of the form of language, both in terms of its physical manifestations and in terms of its underlying mental representations. As such, I formulate and test theories about phonological representations and derivations. This also involves the interfaces between phonology and other components of the grammar (morphology, syntax, semantics and phonetics). I work on the phonology of spoken languages and on the 'phonology' of sign languages, taking a special interest in parallels and differences between these two modalities. Secondary interests are the history of linguistics (specifically phonology), language acquisition (the interplay between environmental input and innate abilities), the evolution of the human mind and language (specifically of phonology) and the expression of meaning through other visual channels such as gesture and (sequential) drawing.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Haskins Laboratories	Julie Van Dyke	Haskins Laboratories	My research investigates the memory system that supports language comprehension, with special focus on individual differences. My approach represents a paradigm shift: rather than focusing on memory capacity as a source of difficulty, I focus on the efficiency of the retrieval mechanism. A related goal is to fully specify the cognitive architecture for language processing, including the mechanisms and time course through which needed information is brought in and out of the focus of attention. Research in my lab aims to characterize factors that limit the ability to retrieve linguistic information from memory, especially interference, decay, quality of lexical representations, and cognitive control. We investigate these issues in diverse populations, including skilled and unskilled readers, dyslexics, Specific Language Impairment, and aging adults, utilizing a clinical approach which includes extensive assessments of cognitive and linguistic ability. Primary experimental methods include the speed-accuracy tradeoff procedure, which provides detailed data about the dynamics of information retrieval, and eye-movement measures during reading, which identify both the time-course and location of processing difficulties. More recent work incorporates fMRI and ERP methods to reveal the neurological bases of these processes.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Rajkumar Verma	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My research interests are to study of stroke pathophysiology primarily from a pharmacological treatment and post-stroke recovery perspective in a rodent model of ischemic focal cerebral ischemia. Besides that, I am interested in understanding the impact of neuro-immune and growth factors component in post-stroke behavioral recovery. Recently, we began to explore the role of purinergic receptor P2X4, a ligand-gated ion channel, in ischemic stroke owing to their critical role in immunomodulation.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Linguistics\|Psychological Sciences	Sandra Villata	Linguistics and Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research is concerned with the grammar-parser relation: it tries to elucidate the mechanisms at play during real-time computations, and to determine whether the grammar and the parser should be conceived of as two separate systems or as two facets of the same cognitive system. I tackle this issue mostly through the lens of ungrammatical sentences using several experimental methods (e.g. acceptability judgments, self-paced reading, and (in collaboration) EEG and computational modelling).
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Maxim Volgushev	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research is aimed at understanding the neuronal basis of brain functioning, with a focus on sensory systems. In recent projects we study: Synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity; Encoding of input activity in the output signals (sequences of spikes) by cortical neurons; Origin and cellular mechanisms of slow sleep oscillation; Dependence of sensory processing on the state of the brain.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Kristin Walker	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests span developmental, educational, and clinical fields. My work explores how language and cognitive abilities influence children’s development. I currently investigate the effect language has on numerical cognition under the Study of Language and Math. As a prospective clinician and interdisciplinary researcher, I am motivated to improve educational and clinical interventions, specifically for children who are deaf and/or have autism spectrum disorder.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Xiaojing Wang	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests are in Bayesian hierarchical modeling and latent variable models, spatial statistics and time series analysis, subgroup analysis and model selection, constrained inference and nonparametric methods.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates		Chandi Witharana	Natural Resources and The Environment, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	My research interests broadly center on methodological developments and adaptations, unsealing faster, deeper, and more accurate analysis of high resolution remote sensing data that would otherwise be possible. I delve into the roots of the problem and aim to close the fundamental gaps; sensory gap and the semantic gap, which affect the real-world modality and the level of abstraction we expect from the data modality
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Nursing	Wanli Xu	Nursing, UConn School of Nursing	My research focus on cognitive function and symptoms cluster in cancer patients. Using multi-omics approach, I am specifically interested in understanding the impact of chemotherapy for colorectal cancer on cognitive impairment and persistent fatigue in patients with colorectal cancer.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Anthropology	Dimitris Xygalatas	Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My interests lie at the intersection between cognition and culture. My research focuses on the role of cultural practices in promoting resilience and fostering social cohesion. I do this by bringing the lab into the field. My lab is dedicated to developing scientific methods and technologies that can be used in real-life settings, from religious temples and sports stadiums to political gatherings.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Jun Yan	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Network analysis, extreme value analysis, event time analysis, clustered data analysis, stochastic processes, statistical computing, and applications in neuroscience, environmental sciences, and public health.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Eiling Yee	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I study conceptual processing (a.k.a semantic memory), primarily in the context of language comprehension. I take a multi-pronged approach to investigate these questions, using eye-tracking and imaging methodologies, in normal and impaired populations. Topics: Semantic memory, the neural representation of concepts, spoken word recognition and language processing, multimodal integration, aphasia and other cognitive deficits, and the neural basis of language
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Georgia Zarkada	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My lab investigates the mechanisms regulating the formation and function of vessel networks. We study the blood and lymphatic vascular systems using a combination of genetic mouse models, single-cell transcriptomics, biochemical and molecular approaches, and state of the art imaging techniques. Our goal is to develop new therapeutic opportunities to treat angiogenesis-related diseases.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Katherine Zavez	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Developing new techniques in statistics for dealing with incomplete data in different contexts.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Molecular and Cell Biology	Ping Zhang	Molecular and Cellular Biology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	We model neurodegenerative diseases in Drosophila. We use genetic and genomic tools to discover critical genes and pathways that mediate neurodegeneration.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Yuping Zhang	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Research interests lie in development and application of statistical and computational methods to address scientific problems in genomics, systems biology, and complex diseases.
Affiliates\|Faculty Affiliates	Statistics	Yao Zheng	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on the statistical learning of time-dependent data. I am currently working on (i) nonasymptotic statistical learning and (ii) high dimensional time series analysis. The objective of (i) is to develop methods that work well even when the sample size is very small, which usually cannot be achieved by conventional asymptotic tools. The objective of (ii) is to develop efficient and robust inference tools for data exhibiting both cross-sectional and time dependencies.

Graduate Student Affiliates

Photo	Name	Research Interests
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Linguistics	Sharmin Ahmadi	Linguistics	I am currently working on some overlooked structures of the Kurdish language which is a less studied language. I am studying these structures syntactically and morphologically.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Yetunde Akinlaja	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in understanding the function of oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) beyond myelination. How OPCs interact with neurons during neuronal hyperexcitability, especially in the forebrain.
Graduate Student Affiliates		Shabnam Alizadeh Incheh	Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences	Bilingualism, sentence processing, speech perception, language control
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Kinesiology	Nidhi Amonkar	Kinesiology, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	My perspective of physio is that prevention is better than cure. My aim is to target the pediatric population and incorporate a healthy lifestyle and raise the awareness of physical fitness from a very young age such that they become better and stronger individuals. I am especially interested in studying the development & growth of individuals with neuro-developmental disabilities such as Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Down syndrome, etc. and how we as PT's can be helpful to them in order to improve.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	William Armstrong	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the molecular mechanisms that govern synaptic connectivity and their downstream behavioral contributions. To study this I am using a combination quantitative neuroanatomy, gene expression analysis and electrophysiology to examine the molecular machinery governing complex behavioral responses mediated by orexin neurons the mammalian lateral hypothalamic area
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Arinjoy Bhattacharjee	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in exploring the behavioral and electrophysiological foundations of central auditory processing in both clinical and non-clinical populations. My focus is on understanding how sensory and emotional information is processed and regulated within the cerebral cortex, and how this influences controlled behavior. I am particularly intrigued by how these processes are disrupted in psychiatric and neurological conditions. My research aims to study information processing in the central auditory system, including auditory processing disorders, and their impact on cognition, emotion, and behavior. To investigate these areas, I utilize electrophysiology, machine learning, and neuropsychological assessments as my primary methods of inquiry.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Cynthia Boo	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Broadly, I am interested in the pragmatic language abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with a particular emphasis on their narrative abilities. I investigate how certain linguistic devices (i.e., discourse markers, pronouns, general all-purpose verbs) play a role in children with ASD’s construction of narratives. Additionally, I am interested in the role of the language sampling context and its associated social, cognitive, and linguistic demands
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Hayes Brenner	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in modeling the process of rhythm entrainment (i.e. individuals syncing up to a musical beat) using nonlinear oscillation dynamics. I am further interested in looking at meaningful differences in rhythm perception between those with ASD and those who are neurotypical, and using that information to refine music therapy applications.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Becca Canale	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests broadly include language and communication in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). More broadly, I’m interested in the neural underpinnings of language processing and learning, including statistical learning, and the impact of individual differences on these cognitive processes.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Zane Carey	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in auditory processing disorders and processes, with a focus on language processing. I am also interested in general health literacy and public health campaigns for healthcare access and equity.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Renee Chasse	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests lie in the behavioral outcomes (anxiety, depression, cognitive impairments, etc.) of various transgenic mouse models. My goal is to help advance the understanding of phenotypic characteristics in new developments of murine genetic engineering.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Literatures Cultures & Langauges	Kaidi Chen	Literatures, Cultures and Langauges, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests are broadly at the intersection of bilingualism and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy. I work on speech perception and specifically the interplay of bottom-up acoustic cues and top-down contextual cues on both native and non-native speech. I am also passionate in applying experimental findings to develop real-world pedagogical innovations.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Communication	Ye Chen	Communication, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research generally looks into the social-psychological and cognitive underpinnings in the use of new digital technologies for communication, information seeking and consumer behaviors. Specifically, I'm interested in using interdisciplinary methods from social-psychology, neuro and cognitive science to tap into people's inner drives and mechanisms for social media and internet activities engagement. Also, I'm interested in computational techniques for dynamic network analysis.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Megan Chiovaro	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My primary research interests are in collective intelligence and social dynamics. Focusing on social systems of invertebrates, I hope to bridge the gap between insect and human behavior using dynamical systems modeling. I am particularly involved in the study of emergent hive behaviors that result from micro-level individualistic laws.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Engineering	Alex Clonan	Engineering, College of Engineering	My research interest is based on using computational methods to interpret the brain. Specifically, I am interested in using biologically inspired models to understand the cognitive processing of the auditory system. I am additionally interested in machine learning applications, physiological data processing, clinical diagnostics, and the biological basis of neuropsychiatric disorder.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Amanda Coletti	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	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.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Jeffrey Crawford	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I'm interested in understanding the neural underpinnings of deficits in different domains of cognition in clinical disorders. Specifically, I want to research how sensory perception is integrated by our mind and how that perception can be altered by interference from external and internal stimuli. I am hopeful that this research can lead to the identification of biomarkers that can help better identify disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Anne Marie Crinnion	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the types of information that people use to understand the sounds of speech, and whether different people rely on different sources of information. I use behavioral, computational and neural methods to study these questions.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Shawn Cummings	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I’m fascinated by speech perception –the way we extract discrete, meaningful units from a messy, transient, and variable acoustic signal. I’m particularly interested in the mechanisms by which we adapt in perception and production of speech to account for variability; my current research examines causal inference herein.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Statistics	Lucas da Cunha Godoy	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Spatial Statistics - Data Visualization - Statistical Computing
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Luiza de Melo Carvalho	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Bilingualism, language and cognition, neural network for reading, literacy development.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Anthropology	Sevgi Demiroglu	Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the relationship between pain, grief, ritual and religiosity. As a cognitive anthropologist, I study death and mourning rituals through analyzing social networks and physiological activity.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Molecular and Cell Biology	Katelyn DeNegre	Molecular and Cell Biology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Presently, I am interested in studying the function of 3 imprinted genes on the mouse X chromosome. These genes are known to be imprinted in the brain and highly expressed in reproductive tissues. I am interested in further understanding their roles in neurodevelopment, behavior, and reproduction.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Neuroscience	Gayle Edelstein	Behavioral Neuroscience, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in pharmacology and drug development for various psychiatric disorders. Specifically, testing new and already approved compounds on animal models of depression, schizophrenia, and Parkinson's disease. Additionally, analyzing the neurochemical effects on these compounds and how those changes can relate to or explain the behavioral results
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Will Fan	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Central noradrenergic neurons are transiently activated when animals react to behaviorally-relevant stimuli. I'm currently trying to understand how norepinephrine release influences the integration of external stimuli into adaptive behavioral responses. To this end, I use in vivo calcium imaging and optogenetics to monitor and control specific circuits in behaving mice. My research may provide some insight into the basis of motivational deficits.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Amanda Fording	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	We know that at any point in development social connectedness between parent and child is very important to child cognitive growth. Yet at any point throughout development there is variability in how parent and child coordinate their attention. I am interested in how parent visual and manual attention directs child behavior at the moment-to-moment scale, supporting processes such as attention, exploration, and language acquisition.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Statistics	Garrett Frady	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Implement Bayesian strategies for variable (or feature) selection when the covariates (and parameters) of interest have both spatial and temporal structures. Fit local Bayesian models using different prior distributions in the presence of high dimensionality in the covariate structure. Conducting binary classification using proposed threshold methods based on the selected prior. Model selection comparing the choice of prior in variable selection performance.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Nursing	Confidence Francis-Edoziuno	Nursing Instruction and Research, School of Nursing	My research interest is in maternal and child health, focusing on breastfeeding, maternal stress, and paternal support. Presently, my research is focused on assessing the role of support systems in reducing maternal stress, and how this influences breastfeeding and infant neurodevelopmental outcomes.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Adrian Frazier	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in perceiving-acting systems, the thermodynamics underlying those systems, and how it is that such systems adapt to changes in the context of constraints during goal directed activities. Further, I worry about fundamentals, such as intentionality, normativity, and the emergence of goals, as well as philosophy of science. Expertise: R/RStudio; Markdown/LaTeX; Matlab; ggplot/plotly; multilevel/growth curve modeling; detrended fluctuation analysis; psychopy
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Emily Fritzson	Human Development and Family Sciences , College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests revolve around the health and well-being of individuals with chronic illness and their loved ones. I am specifically interested in how stress, adjustment, and coping influence psychosocial and physical outcomes in this population.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Neuroscience	Matthew Frost	Neuroscience, UConn Health	Axonal regeneration in the CNS after trauma
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Meara Geraty	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research centers around the cognitive science of religion. In particular, I am interested in the decline of traditional religiosity and the relationship between religiosity/spirituality, wellbeing, and meaning in life.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Caitrin Hall	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research explores social dynamics, interpersonal coordination, and group synchronization. I'm interested in how environmental and social contexts modulate behavior and health outcomes. Through my work I aim to bridge our understanding of individuals and collective structures, with a specific focus on intergroup relations and systems of oppression.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Andrew Henreid	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am chiefly interested in the cognitive systems that shape human decision-making, especially in the contexts of health care and public health. The goal of my research is to incorporate theories of psychology and cognitive science to investigate the role of attention, perception, motivation, and intelligence (human & machine) in behavioral processes across multiple disciplines.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Julianna Herman	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in how disease impacts early brain development. My current work addresses how maternal illness affects a stem cell niche in the brain of developing embryos, and how this modulates the neural stem cell functions of neurogenesis and ependymogenesis along the lateral ventricle surface. I am mainly focused on how the ependymogenesis-neurogenesis relationship changes in cases of post infectious fetal-onset hydrocephalus.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Abagail Horton	Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include the interface of brain development, and social and emotional skills (e.g., emotion regulation) with "negative" (e.g., victimization, bully/victim relations) child and adolescent peer relationships and interactions.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Philosophy	Robin Jenkins	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My main interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, and logic. In particular, I am interested in how natural language represents agency, action, and normativity. A natural consequence of these interests mean more broadly I am interested in modality, aspect and tense.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Maggie Khuu	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in understanding how disordered breathing can affect key neurological processes. My current research focuses on examining the functional role of CO2/H+ activated hypothalamic neurons and its relationship to brainstem respiratory centers to control and regulate breathing.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Nathan Lautz	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Nathan Lautz studies the neurocognitive basis of concepts. He’s interested in how conceptual knowledge comes to be grounded through experience in the world, with at least some aspects of meaning consequently stored in corresponding sensorimotor and affective systems in the brain. His research addresses how this grounding affects the format and content of mental representation.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Kaya LeGrand	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I study language development in people on the autism spectrum. My current work focuses on verb production in autistic children. More generally, I'm interested in studying the language and communication abilities of low/minimally verbal and non-speaking autistic individuals, with the ultimate goal of contributing to our understanding of why some people do not learn to produce language.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Pharmaceutical Sciences	Michael Lehane	Pharmaceutical Sciences, UConn School of Pharmacy	My research interests include behavioral, pharmacological and epigenetic mechanisms involved in animal models of substance use disorder, specifically opioid use disorder. My current project focuses on treatments for opioid withdrawal in mice.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates\|Research Assistants	Psychological Sciences	Wesley Leong	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in how the brain makes sense of events that it experiences through language. I am primarily interested in what our brains do that allows us to mentally represent participants and actions in these events, and how that may differ from events that we experience first-hand. I address these questions using a combination of behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational techniques.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates		Cindy Li	UConn Health	I am interested in the role of an ion channel-enzyme ("chanzyme") called TRPM7 in cardiovascular diseases, including but not limited to ischemic stroke, atherosclerosis, aneurysm, myocardial infarction, ischemia-reperfusion injury, etc. Particular focus on the role of TRPM7 in such chronic diseases from an inflammation perspective.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Jie Luo	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include neural mechanisms of reading development and the neural signatures of successful reading instruction/learning intervention outcomes. I want to bridge the gap between educational practice and cognitive neuroscience and hopes it will eventually benefit individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates\|Research Assistants	Psychological Sciences	Kelly Mahaffy	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on the intersections of cognition and literature. Specifically, I focus on empathy, theory of mind, and embodied experiences in multiple genres and forms. I focus on questions like "What about the graphic novel prompts experiences of empathy or practices of theory of mind differently than prose?" and "How and why can some readers embody the experience of characters while reading?" My work uses a combination of literary theory, cognitive science and psychology, and aesthetics.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Statistics	Alokesh Manna	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Spatial, temporal, forensic, brain image.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Steven Masi	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests focus on the interaction of phenomena traditionally categorized as perception, cognition, and action.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates\|Research Assistants	Psychological Sciences	Hannah Mechtenberg	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests are concerned with the intersection of language and analogical reasoning, and the implications for education. I am especially interested in how psycholinguistic properties of words may factor into verbal analogical reasoning mechanisms, and how this may manifest behaviorally and neutrally.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Wesley Medeiros	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Cognitive Neuroscience in general, focusing on language, behavior, human electrophysiology and human neuromodulation. Currently pursues speech perception and computational models of speech.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Gabrielle Michel	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in social communication and sensory processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). My current research aims to understand grapheme-color synesthesia in ASD, which is the ability to associate letters and numbers with colors. The other line of my research focuses on accessible and parent-mediated early interventions for ASD, as well as how interventions predict later outcomes in language abilities and the presence of co-occurring conditions.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Julia Migliorati	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the role of Transforming Growth Factor beta-like 1 (TGFBR1) in angiogenesis, and particularly its unique role in vascularization of the brain and retina. TGFBR1 has shown to be required for functional angiogenic sprouting in the neuroretina, and I look forward to unveiling the molecular mechanism behind this.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Hannah O'Connor	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Gender differences in language and communication in autism spectrum disorder
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Chemistry	Taiwwo Ogunmilade	Chemistry, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research focuses on the development and application of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) to vanquish bacterial resistance, a growing global health challenge that threatens efficacy of traditional antibiotics. I am particularly interested in exploring the intersection of microbial health and brain function. With increasing evidence linking systemic infections and neuroinflammation to cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases, my work aims to understand how AMPs can be utilized not only to combat the resistant bacterial infections but also protect from inflammation-induced damage.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Jairo Orea	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the neuroanatomical basis of learning and memory, and specifically how synaptic circuits are reorganized when emotional memories are formed. I aim to study the fine functional anatomy of canonical and non-canonical sensory inputs to the lateral amygdala and their involvement in auditory fear learning using rodent models.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Philosophy	Aliyar Ozercan	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Aliyar’s interests are in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Neuropsychology. He has worked on distinguishing speaker reference from audience reference. As his current research focuses on the neural activity of encoding and decoding representations, his overall aim is to develop a unified and robust theory to explain the whole processes involved in conversation -- from constructing, storing, and accessing representations to transferring and creating stimuli.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Emily Parrish-Mulliken	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the spine apparatus and studying morphological alterations to this structure in response to Pavlovian fear learning. To accomplish this, I use light-level and electron microscopy.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Madeline Quam	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in language emergence and development, particularly with regard to homesigners (deaf individuals who do not have access to signed or spoken language input and innovate gesture systems to communicate with the hearing people around them). I am also interested in how language exposure can affect math knowledge and performance.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Gianna Raimondi	Physiology and Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	We are interested in understanding circuit representations of fear learning and safety, specifically synaptic reorganization as a result of the formation of emotional memories. Anxiety is known to fluctuate over the female reproductive cycle, and our long-term goal is to understand the effects of the natural hormone cyclicity on anxiety circuitry in the female rat brain.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Antonio Matt Reck	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am broadly interested in pharmacological methods of managing pain using cannabinoids and opioids. My dissertation research focuses on regulators of signaling (RGS) proteins and their implication in chronic pain etiology.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Philosophy	Kaley Rittichier	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in the cognitive role and epistemic value of different forms of natural language. A particular interest of mine is story form including how formal/computational systems can interpret it. This connects to my broader interest in how AI can serve or harm us epistemically.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Heather Robinson	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Broadly, I'm interested in the relationship between cognition and emotion in the brain and in clinical populations. Specifically, I'm interested in how attention differs in mood disorders and whether we can predict behavioral and clinical outcomes with neural data.
Graduate Student Affiliates		Precious-Janae Romain	Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences	My research focuses on spoken language development in children with hearing loss using cochlear implants or hearing aids. I study how child temperament influences parent-child interactions, joint attention, and word learning. I aim to expand this work to explore parent temperament and cultural differences in temperament across diverse populations.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Aleksandra Rusowicz	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Why do some people want to dominate others? Why do some oppose intergroup equality while others support it? Most importantly, how can we promote social tolerance and justice? I want to answer these questions by integrating social psychology, political science, and neuroscience. I aim to ground my research in intergroup relations theory and sociopolitical history to ensure that it benefits systemically marginalized communities.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates		Usman Salahuddin	Institute of Material Science	Brain machine interfaces, Brain computer interfaces, Micro-electrodes and nano-materials related to the development of efficient micro-electrodes.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Mohammad Amin Saraei	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Cognitive science of religion and spirituality
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Nutritional Sciences	Sorour Sarihi	Nutritional Sciences, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	Microbiome and Diet: Investigating how dietary patterns influence microbiome diversity and the gut-brain axis in preventing cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases; Nutraceuticals: Exploring the role of plant-based supplements in mitigating IBD, neurodegenerative diseases, and cerebral ischemia; Seaweed Research: Examining the effects of seaweed extracts (prebiotics) on intestinal inflammation the gut-brain connection and their potential
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Naomi Sellers	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am interested in how the brain forms and sends predictions during language processing and the effects they might have on functions like speech comprehension and error detection. Moreover, I want to study how the ability to predict and the effects of prediction on language processing might vary across individuals, both across healthy individuals as well as in those with acquired language disorders.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Caitlin Senni	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My current interests include (1) the conceptual formation, mental representation, and processing of abstract words; (2) language acquisition and performance across individual differences; and (3) Theory of Mind. These interests motivate my desire to study child language assessment, with a particular interest in examining the ways that language bias can shape psychometric items and impact diverse populations.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Pharmaceutical Sciences	Afshin Seyednejad	Pharmaceutical Sciences, UConn School of Pharmacy	The Sartor lab utilizes behavioral, pharmacological, epigenetic, and cell type-specific analyses to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying substance use disorder. My projects revolve around the role of coding and non-coding RNA in the neuroadaptations that drive or accompany cocaine use disorder.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Kinesiology	Vaishnavi Shahane	Kinesiology, College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources	Infant and child development, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, Down Syndrome, Pediatric Physiotherapy, Pediatric rehabilitation, Novel movement-based interventions for children with developmental disabilities, Assistive technologies and aids to empower children with disabilities
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Educational Psychology	Kristin Simmers	Educational Psychology, NEAG School of Education	I am interested in researching how and to what extent knowledge from the interdisciplinary field of Mind, Brain and Education science (MBE) impacts novice or pre-service teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and actions. This could lead to further research into specific MBE teacher education opportunities and subsequent changes in teacher efficacy and/or learner outcomes
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Skyler Sklenarik	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research to date has focused on the cognitive processes underlying both substance and behavioral addictions. I have designed multiple Approach-Avoidance Tasks to examine automatic approach biases for different addictive stimuli, which contribute to the maintenance of addictive behaviors. I am interested in developing cognitive bias modification interventions to restructure maladaptive cognitive processes, and in turn, reduce real-life, problematic behaviors.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering	Andrew Slater	Biomedical Engineering, UConn College of Engineering	We are working with Firefighter technology that will help firefighter in the following areas: pairing - allows firefighters to better stay connected; targeting - enables firefighters to better find a target location; evacuation - enables firefighter to better find the route out to safety.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Music	Kimberly Soby	Music, UConn School of Fine Arts	My work seeks to understand the relationship between gender and musical creativity, with specific regards to cognitive perception as applied to aesthetic musical values.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Philosophy	Utku Sonsayar	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My interest lies within the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I am interested in the following topics i) acquisition of speech acts and other pragmatic phenomena, ii) structural approaches to consciousness and iii) the relationship between number acquisition and acquisition of quantifiers. Moreover, I am particularly interested in how empirical findings can vindicate philosophical theories within philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Louisa Suting	Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I am a certified Speech Language Pathologist and a doctoral student with a passion for improving the treatment outcomes in individuals with aphasia. I believe we can achieve this by identifying ecologically valid measures to assess language recovery and discovering objective biomarkers to personalize treatment for individuals with aphasia.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering	Zeinab Tajik Mansouri	Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering	I am interested in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), computational neuroscience, and the application of machine learning techniques to understand brain function and neural dynamics.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Neuroscience	William Theune	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My research interests focus on the identification of developmentally regulated small RNAs which can regulate adult CNS axon regeneration. The goal of my research is to identify factors which promote regeneration to assist in the future development of treatments for brain injury and neurodegenerative disease.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Gray Thomas	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests focus on meaningful interactions, the consequences of conflict in conversations and how to mitigate them with interpersonal synchronous interventions, and also reframing how we understand prospective memory from an ecological dynamic perspective.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Susan Tilbury	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My work aims to deepen our understanding of brain-body dynamics during perception-action cycles in both health and disease. Using multimodal data collection in naturalistic experimental designs, we seek to learn more about the complex relationship between the central and autonomic nervous systems in perceiving and navigating the world.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Ryan Troha	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Learning through the observation of others is an essential skill to surviving and thriving in one’s environment. I am interested in the neuronal mechanisms underlying this form of social learning in animals. What brain areas mediate this form of learning? How might these areas differ in people with social learning deficits?
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Olivia Vanegas	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	While opioids are the gold standard prescription analgesics for chronic pain, they are highly addictive and the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. My work investigates the therapeutic efficacy of minor phytocannabinoids and terpenes in mouse models of chronic pain, anxiety, and depression while screening these compounds for dependence potential and abuse liability. My goal is to identify less-addictive pharmacotherapies for pain and related mental health disorders.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Martina Villa	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Reading is a complex cognitive function for which the brain is not congenitally wired, yet reading disabilities have a probable genetic causation. I am interested in using cutting edge techniques to integrate multimodal neuroimaging data to better study the relationship between genetics and reading (dis)abilities as mediated by the brain.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates		Faith Wariri	Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering	My research interests include using Machine learning to analyze neuroimaging data in adolescent children such as children in neurodiverse population. I focus on uncovering neural correlates of learning and behavioral markers such as irritability in adolescents, with the goal of developing targeted interventions for educational improvement and mental health support.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Emma Wing	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I work on the mapping between morphosyntax and the mental representation of events in which objects change state. I am interested in how grammatical categories (e.g., tense, aspect, participles, etc.) activate the content of event representations during sentence comprehension, and how this content changes depending on the syntactic environment.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Tyler Wrenn	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests at UConn are in behavioral neuroscience, specifically observational learning in rat models. I'm interested in the possible patterns and factors that influence optimal learning in a given observational learning task such as rats learning best from the same species of rat or a different species.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Statistics	Shiying Xiao	Statistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Network analysis, national economic accounting, input-output analysis, applied econometrics, macroeconomic statistical analysis.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Educational Psychology	Lihong Xie	Educational Psychology, NEAG School of Education	I am currently a first-year doctoral student and works as a graduate assistant in the Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent Development program. My research interest lies in creative thinking development in the classroom, gifted women and creativity in cross-cultural settings.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Menghan Yang	Developmental Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Partial word learning under referential ambiguity; nature of partial knowledge and semantic representation; semantic network constructed from low informative environment.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering	Xu Zhang	Biomedical Engineering, UConn College of Engineering	I study the mechanisms and novel ways of electrical neurostimulation for treatment of neuropsychiatric diseases from a computational perspective. Specifically, I am working on the cerebellar involvement in parkinson's disease and essential tremor, and how deep brain stimulation could improve such conditions. I am also interested in ultrasonic neurostimulation as an alternative approach to modulate neural activities.
Affiliates\|Graduate Student Affiliates	Human Development and Family Sciences	Yuan Zhang	Human Development and Family Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests are on parent-child relationships, acculturative stress, and identity development in immigrant families, especially Asian immigrant families. My research projects have included how parent involvement influences Asian adolescents’ academic performance; the relation between parental behavior and adolescents’ ethnic identity development; and how acculturative stress and parent-child acculturation gaps affect the behavioral and cognitive development of Asian children.

Postdoctoral Affiliates

Photo	Name	Department	Research Interests
Affiliates\|Postdoctoral Affiliates	Linguistics		Shengyun Gu	Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My main research interests lie in phonology, phonetics, morphology, and prosody in spoken and particularly signed languages (such as Shanghai Sign Language and ASL), using theoretical and experimental approaches. My work aims to better understand phonology with respect to its structure, processing, and acquisition through the lens of deaf sign languages. I also document Shanghai Sign Language by contributing to the lexical database and corpora of this understudied language variety.
Postdoctoral Affiliates			Katarina Milicevic	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My current research focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neuronal excitability in neurodegenerative disease models, using approaches such as calcium and voltage imaging, electrophysiology (patch-clamp recordings), and immunolabeling.

External Affiliates

Photo	Name	Research Interests
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Sumbleen Ali	Human Development and Family Studies, SUNY Oneonta	I work on understanding psychological adjustment and personality as correlates of interpersonal acceptance-rejection. My prior graduate degree in psychology and my current studies in HDFS have given me an interdisciplinary cross-cultural perspective in research. Currently I am investigating the neurobiology of social rejection by investigating the way in which adults’ remembrances of parental acceptance-rejection in childhood influence neural responses to rejection.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		David Braze	Haskins Laboratories	I study the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the human ability to fluidly assemble meaning from more-or-less novel strings of words. So, a central question is that of how lexical, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic cues, as encoded in the spoken or written word, interact with one another to yield a percept of meaning. I am particularly interested in individual variation around 'typical' behavior and development of language skills.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Lauren Bryant	Psychology, SUNY Albany	I am interested in higher-order processes (e.g., executive functions) that support emotional and cognitive self-regulation. Specifically, I am interested in environmental (e.g., providing rewards/incentives) and biological (e.g., sex, gender) factors that jointly influence children's self-regulatory abilities. My research incorporates biopsychological and socio-cognitive neuroscience approaches.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Jie Chan	College of Nursing, Florida State University	My long-term research plan is to develop a comprehensive understanding of bio-behavioral and multi-omics mechanism of pain and develop and tailor precision interventions to predict, prevent, and treat pain among older adults with cardiovascular disease.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Dandan Chen	Pearson	Educational/psychological instrument design and evaluation (i.e., psychometrics), reliability and validity, standardized assessments, adaptive learning
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Matthew Costello	College of Arts and Sciences, University of Hartford	My research explores age-related differences in cognition and perception from an embodied cognition perspective. Current research questions focus on how older adults perform in visual working memory, time perception, language processing and tool-use.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Nicole Cruse	Sacred Heart University	Executive dysfunction after brain injury, TBI, cognitive-communicative disorders, aphasia, and Virtual Gaming as a tool for cognitive rehabilitation
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Charles Davis	Duke University	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.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Benjamin De Bari	DeSales University	I am interested in the physical principles supporting biological systems and their behavior. Biological systems’ presence in the world is importantly tied to their functional capacities. I want to investigate the physical principles which underwrite these behaviors, and the physical systems which instantiate these fundamental activities
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Lana Delasanta	University of Connecticut and self-employed podcaster	My current interests are collective consciousness and ecological psychology.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Julia Drouin	University of North Carolina School of Medicine	Speech perception, perceptual learning, cochlear implants
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Matthew Eastman	Panluminate	My current research projects include developing a spatial multiomics platform, assays, and bioinformatic analyses.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Teresa Girolamo	San Diego State University	My research addresses language in autism, including how individual differences in language and environmental factors shape developmental trajectories. I study language at the levels of behavior and brain, using community-based participatory research and functional near-infrared spectroscopy. I am also interested in ensuring that research tools, whether neuroscience or behavioral clinical assessments, are generalizable and promote science representative of the population.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Vincent Gracco	Yale School of Medicine	My research focuses on the neuroscience of human communication and their disorders using multiple neuroimaging modalities and physiological techniques. Current research is focused on sensorimotor and cognitive control processes for spoken language, network targeted neuromodulation as a treatment for disorders of speech and voice, neural adaptation and compensation resulting from sensory deprivation and hearing restoration in cochlear implanted children and adults and investigating variation in response to reading remediation in children with Reading Disability using dynamic brain/behavior tracking.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates	Educational Psychology	Devin Kearns	North Carolina State University	I am interested in reading acquisition in children with and at risk for dyslexia. My research includes studies of basic processes in reading--particularly for polysyllabic and polymorphemic words--and interventions to improve word reading skills.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Kyra Krass	National Organization for Rare Disorders	I am interested in using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to study sentence processing and event representation. My research seeks to find which object states are active in the brain when individuals process change of state verbs. I am also interested in what role anticipation and affordances play in sentence processing.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Oliver Lasnick	University of Connecticut	I am interested in both the etiology and neural endophenotypes of reading and language disorders, particularly developmental dyslexia. In my work I leverage both neuroimaging and computational approaches, particularly with large, diverse datasets. For my research I analyze both structural (MRI) and functional (fMRI, EEG) neuroimaging data, with the goal of identifying both neural correlates and early predictors of dyslexia.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Oliver Lasnick	University of Connecticut	I am interested in both the etiology and neural endophenotypes of reading and language disorders, particularly developmental dyslexia. In my work I leverage both neuroimaging and computational approaches, particularly with large, diverse datasets. For my research I analyze both structural (MRI) and functional (fMRI, EEG) neuroimaging data, with the goal of identifying both neural correlates and early predictors of dyslexia.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Derek Lee	Boston College	Cancer metabolism
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Tommy Lee	Emory University	Psychiatric disorders can impair social functioning in everyday life. In an effort to translate neural mechanisms into potential future treatments, my current research elucidates the neuroscience of social behavior and memory. To answer outstanding questions, I utilize behavioral paradigms, neuropharmacology, electrophysiology, and computational neuroscience.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Lu Li	Convergent Science	3D bioprinting, additive manufacturing for metals, thermo-fluids, multiphase flow, crack of composite materials.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Jin Lu	University of Georgia, School of Computing	Machine learning, AI, health informatics, and medical informatics
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Natasza Marrouch	University of Lisbon	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.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Ruth McCleod	The College of The Holy Cross	My research interests are focused on early brain injuries that occur in preterm infants, outcomes after injury and potential treatments. my studies mainly focus in modeling injuries in rodents to test the effects of potential treatments on cognitive outcomes. I also work with medical record data to further understand what factors, such as inflammation and prenatal conditions, effect developmental outcomes.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Timothy Mckay	Central Connecticut State University	General research topics that I am interested include: Working memory as it relates to sexual minority stress; learning potential and academic achievement in underserved minority populations; as well as mental health behaviors and outcomes in stigmatized populations. Currently working on the UConn/HRC- LGBTQ Teen Youth Study as a Research Assistant with Dr. Ryan Watson.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Timothy Michaels	Northwell Health	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. (Social Determinants of Psychosis/Psychosis Risk.)
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Katelyn Mooney	University of California Los Angeles	I am interested in studying the effectiveness of low carbohydrate diets at ameliorating symptoms of post-traumatic brain injury such as learning deficits and aggression in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) models. By supplementing high-carbohydrate diets with the ketogenic metabolite beta-hydroxybutyrate my research is aimed at working to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie ketone body supplementation that make it an effective treatment for neuropathological conditions.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Marmar Moussa	University of Oklahoma	My research interests are related to computational genomics and biology and computational neuroscience, single cell genomics, cognitive science and brain transcriptomics.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Ashley Parker	University of Pittsburgh, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences	Biomarkers of hearing health, auditory processing, auditory electrophysiology, hearing loss
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Robert Pijewski	Ana Maria College	My research interests lie in elucidating the fundamental processes underlying aspects of glial biology that lead to nervous system pathology. Accordingly, the focus of my research is to characterize the cellular differences contributing to central nervous system remyelination using human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells from multiple sclerosis (MS) patients.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Sarah Powell	Vanderbilt University Medical Center	My research uses electrophysiologic methods alongside behavioral auditory tests to examine individual variability in auditory processing and perception. I am interested in how different experiences may push the limits of clinically "normal" hearing over a listener's lifetime and how research in this area can be translated to better inform both clinical practice and public health.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Yarina Prystauka	University of Bergen	My research interests are (cognitive neuroscience of) sentence processing in monolingual and bilingual speakers.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Caroline Richter	University of Alabama at Birmingham	I received my Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Louisville in 2021. I am interested in understanding the cognitive and socio-emotional aspects that contribute to the variability on the academic achievement of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. I am particularly interested in working with children with learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, and Williams syndrome.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Janelle Salisbury	Delta College	My (broad-level) research interests are philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, and ethics. I am interested in the neural mechanisms of sensation and how these connect to what is experienced from the first-person point of view. I am also interested in the formation of concepts and the influences of language on thought and experience. I have emerging research interests in the ethics of caring and radical empathy.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Amin Sherafat	Boehringer Ingelheim	I am interested in to work on neuro-glia interactions, computational biology, learning and Memory, neurodegenerative diseases and bioinformatics.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Elizabeth Simmons	Yale School of Medicine	My research encompasses how toddlers with and without language delay learn and process spoken words. I use eye tracking and EEG to answer my research questions
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Preeti Srinivasan	Service Now	My research interests lie at the intersection of communication and Human-computer interaction (HCI). I study information acquisition and processing from social and mobile news media. More specifically, I’m interested in looking at how cognitive processes such as attention, elaboration, engagement, and design features of such platforms impact learning and processing, in a bid to provide design implications to such platforms, and to augment user-experience thereof.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Emily Yearling	Ball State University	My primary research focuses on the relationship between action and perception in facilitating the development of cognitive control abilities associated with goal directed behavior and problem solving. The physiological development of the brain is not the only driver of the development of executive function. It stems from the dynamic reciprocal interactions between our brains, our experiences, and our environment.
Affiliates\|External Affiliates		Xinming Zhou	University of Texas at Austin	My research interests lie in the cognitive and neural basis of challenging speech perception, such as non-native speech sounds and speech-in-noise.

Executive Steering Committee

Photo	Name	Research Interests
Administration\|Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Inge-Marie Eigsti	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research addresses a fundamental issue in human cognition: how constraints imposed by brain development and core neurocognitive processes impact language acquisition. As a scientist, I am intrigued by the interaction of language acquisition and brain development. As a clinician, I am motivated to understand the puzzles presented by atypical development, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and its consequences, because of what they mean for intervention. We use multiple converging approaches in my lab: experimental behavioral tasks, structural and functional imaging, and eyetracking, in our research.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Holly Fitch	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Rodent models of developmental disability and neonatal brain injury and developmental disability; Modulating effects of hormones and experience; Neuroprotection
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Philosophy	Lewis Gordon	Philosophy, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research interests include Africana Philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Aesthetics and Philosophy in Film, Literature, and Music, Philosophy of Culture, Race, and Racism, Philosophy of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis, and Global Southern Thought.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Physiology and Neurobiology	Alexander Jackson	Physiology & Neurobiology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Research in the laboratory is focused on the cellular and synaptic neurophysiology of neural circuits in the mammalian hypothalamus that regulate fundamental behavioral states such as sleep, arousal and feeding. Techniques are centered on using patch-clamp electrophysiology and pharmacology in brain slices in order to elucidate the cellular and synaptic properties of specific hypothalamic cell-types and their local and long-range synaptic connectivity. This approach is carried out in concert with a toolbox of neuroanatomical methods, optogenetic strategies to manipulate the excitability of genetically targeted neurons and through collaborative work, single-cell transcriptional profiling.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Nursing	Steve Kinsey	Nursing, UConn School of Nursing	I am a biomedical researcher with specialized training in behavioral neuroscience, immunology, and pharmacology. My students and I research the effects of stress and drugs on pain, inflammation, and emotion. My goal is to apply pain and drug dependence research approaches to find new opioid-sparing pain treatments.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Neuroscience	Eric Levine	Neuroscience, UConn Health	My laboratory studies synaptic modulation in the hippocampus and cortex of the mammalian brain, focusing on the roles of endogenous cannabinoids and nerve growth factors in various forms of synaptic plasticity that are important for learning and memory. We are also using patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) lines to study the pathophysiology of autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Linguistics	Diane Lillo-Martin	Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research investigates the nature of language and its acquisition by studying American Sign Language (ASL), the acquisition of ASL by Deaf children, bimodal bilingual acquisition of ASL and spoken English by hearing children in Deaf-parented families, and the acquisition of English by hearing children. I am especially interested in how the study of sign languages can contribute to broadening understanding of what is universal and what is modality-specific.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Jennifer Mozeiko	Speech Language and Hearing Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Research in the Aphasia Rehab Lab is focused on the optimization of aphasia rehabilitation. Specifically, we are looking at how clinicians can manipulate the neuroplastic response to treatment for the best possible language outcomes. Dosage, durability of treatment over time and generalization of gains to discourse production are predominant themes in much of our work.
Administration\|Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences\|Speech Language and Hearing Sciences	Emily Myers	Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My research program focuses on the neural and behavioral mechanisms that enable listeners to map the speech signal onto meaning. In this program of study, I use neuroimaging techniques, principally fMRI, to investigate how the brain responds to acoustic variation within and between categories, and behavioral methods to probe the mechanisms that allow for parsing the speech stream into meaningful categories. These questions are applied to typical populations as well as to individuals with acquired language disorders (aphasia) or developmental language disorders (reading disorder, language impairment).
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	Alexandra Paxton	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	I take a data-rich approach to capture the many ways in which our language, movement, decisions, and emotions change during social contact in laboratory and real-world settings. Understanding how conversational goals, social connections, and physical spaces shape our emerging behaviors is a primary goal of my research, embedded within rich traditions of dynamical and ecological perspectives. Recently, I have also become interested in exploring social behaviors in non-human systems.
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates		Diane Quinn	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciencese	Prof. Quinn focuses on the experiences of members of stigmatized groups, self-related cognitions, behavior, and affect. She has examined how identity related constructs determine psychological and health related outcomes for people with socially stigmatized identities. She has focused on issues related to mental illness, gender stereotypes, self-objectification, and the stigma of overweight.
Administration\|Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Psychological Sciences	John Salamone	Psychological Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	Psychopharmacology and drug development; Neurochemistry, signal transduction, and behavior; Behavioral functions of dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, and adeenosine; Animal models of Parkinson’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, fatigue
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Biomedical Engineering	Sabato Santaniello	Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering	My laboratory develops modeling and analysis tools to understand the effects of neural disorders on the brain’s electrophysiology, from single units to neural populations. We also focus on designing control algorithms for adaptive, robust, optimal neural prostheses, with application to Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, deep brain stimulation, and brain-computer interface. One ongoing project aims to develop algorithms for automatic localization of the epileptogenic onset zone and seizure onset detection in drug-resistant epileptic patients. Another ongoing project aims to understand the role of stimulation-elicited resonant effects in the motor striatum in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease
Affiliates\|Executive Steering Committee\|Faculty Affiliates	Anthropology	Dimitris Xygalatas	Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences	My interests lie at the intersection between cognition and culture. My research focuses on the role of cultural practices in promoting resilience and fostering social cohesion. I do this by bringing the lab into the field. My lab is dedicated to developing scientific methods and technologies that can be used in real-life settings, from religious temples and sports stadiums to political gatherings.

Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Faculty Affiliates

Graduate Student Affiliates

Postdoctoral Affiliates

External Affiliates

Executive Steering Committee

Quick Links

Research Facilities