Department of Psychology

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Rhode Island

Margeaux's work involves the study of memory and aging.  She is exploring the role of personality factors in source memory.  Her next project will focus on false memory in older adults and hopes that by examining aspects that influence memory errors her work can be applied in a practical setting to improve memory as we age.

Erin Bishop

Undergraduate Institution:
Hamilton College

Erin is interested in the link between parent-child relationships and child aggression and victimization. Her previous research focused on the link between parents' beliefs about aggression and their children's beliefs about aggression and acts of aggression. Currently, she is examining parent strategies for dealing with their children's victimization in high school.

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Nicholas Brisbon
Area: Social Development
Lab: Lifespan Lab
Advisor: Margie Lachman
Location: Brown 318
Email: nbris@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3208

Undergraduate Institution:
University of MA at Amherst

Undergraduate Institution:
Boston University

Brittany's research uses fMRI and behavioral methods to study the neuroscience of human social behavior and memory throughout the lifespan.  Her current work focuses on how encoding context modulates the way people are able to remember impressions of others, and how the neural correlates of impression formation change with increasing age.  She is also interested in how different facial characteristics interact with behavioral information when encoding first impressions.

Xuejie Chen
Area: Brain, Body & Behavior
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Nicolas Rohleder
Location: Brown 25
Email: xjchen@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3437

Undergraduate University:
Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine

Xuejie is interested in exploring the influence of psychological factors on health. Currently she is participating in a project on how the immune system responds and habituates to repeated acute social stress (TSST) and the difference of these pattern between age groups (young adult and old adult). She is also interested in the role of cognitive appraisal as the moderate/mediator factors between stress and health outcomes.

Undergraduate Institution:
Case Western Reserve University

Henry's research focuses on identifying the visual structures and dynamical tuning processes humans use to perceive their natural environment by using classical psychophysics along with eye-tracking systems and large-size displays. He is currently researching what role higher order correlations among basic scene attributes, such as orientation and contrast, may play in visual perception. He is also interested in the neural correlates of visual perception and stimulus coding. 

Danielle Gianferante
Area: Brain, Body & Behavior
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Nicolas Rohleder
Location: Brown 25
Email: dgia@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3437

Undergraduate Institution:
University of MA Amherst

Danielle does research in the Health Psychology lab. She is primarily interested in the role that stress hormones have in immune system functioning, particularly as people age. She is also interested in cognitive processes, such as rumination, that can affect hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity.

Sonja Krstic
Area: Social Development
Lab: Knight Lab
Advisor: Raymond Knight
Location: Brown 15
Email: skrstic@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3298

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Belgrade

Undergraduate Institution:
Bloomsburg University

Mary Jo's research interests include looking at the links between attention and emotion regulation in older adults. She is currently completing a project where she examined whether or not older individuals use attentional biases to positive emotional information to regulate their moods.

Amanda Lash
Area: Cognitive Neuroscience
Lab: Memory & Cognition Lab
Advisor: Arthur Wingfield
Location: Volen 356
Email:  aml9743@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3298

Undergraduate Institution:
University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Hyeon-Nyeon Lee
Area: Social Development
Lab: Aging Culture & Cognition
Advisor: Angela Gutchess
Location: Brown 24
Email:hnlee@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3031

Undergraduate Institution:
Ball State University

Hyeon-Nyeon Lee's research interest is in how age, culture and gender affect memory processes. She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines the ways in which group identity affects group-referential memory in multiple dimensions and how these affects change with age.   Her outside interests are in politics and international relations.

Yoona Lee
Area: Social Development
Lab: Watson Lab
Advisor: Malcolm Watson
Location: Rabb 116-118
Email: yoona@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3252

Undergraduate Institution:
Sungshin Women's University

Yoona’s research involves the study of peer aggression (bullying as bullies and victims), parental aggression (punitive discipline and child abuse), and apology/forgiveness. Specifically, it includes developmental trajectories of externalizing/internalizing behaviors as outcomes of timing effects of bullying (stability and change of bully status) and moderating effects of family relationships, different qualitative hierachy of child abuse type perception across cultures, the effects of hierarchical and cumulative types of child maltreatment on subsequent risks, and how offenders and victims use self-other apology and forgiveness. Currently, she is examining the moderators of ethnic family relationships and normativeness of punitive discipline between punitive discipline and externalizing behaviors across ethnicities. 

Undergraduate Institution:
Beijing Normal University

Monika Lohani

Undergraduate Institution:
M.J.P. Rohilkhand University

Monika’s research focuses on studying individual and age-related differences in managing emotions.  She has used different measures to assess emotional response including self-report, expression, eye tracking, and psychophysiology.  She is interested in understanding more efficient ways of managing emotions through the use of multiple methods.

Sarah Lupis
Area: Brain, Body & Behavior
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Jutta Wolf
Location: Brown 318
Email: slupis@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3280

Undergraduate Institution:
Boston University

Sarah's research focuses on investigating the effects of emotion experience on the physiological stress response.  She is currently using facial coding analysis to determine the role of self-conscious emotions experienced during an acute psychosocial stressor, and the ways that body esteem may mediate this relationship.  Sarah also serves as a phlebotomist for the the Brandeis Health Psychology laboratory.

Undergraduate Institution:
Fitchburg State College

Scott's research interests include aesthetic emotion, appraisal theory, tragic pleasure, the elicitation and differentiation of enjoyment and interest in music and art, the taxometric structure of emotion, and nonverbal emotion perception. Using an in vivo experimental approach, he is currently examining the appraisal structure of interest when elicited through auditory and visual channels (e.g. classical music and impressionist paintings), as well as facial expressions of interest. He is also conducting a concurrent study examining the enjoyment and pursuit of negative emotions in music and art which would normally be considered aversive in non-aesthetic environments. 

Nhi Ngo
Area: Social Development
Lab: Emotion Lab
Advisor: Derek Isaacowitz
Location: Volen 316
Email: nhi@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3282

Undergraduate Institution:
Oberlin College

Undergraduate Institution:
University of New Hampshire 

Abby is interested in how people learn and monitor expectations for future events. She uses behavioral methods, eye tracking, and EEG source localization to study how neural activity changes as expectations develop, which systems react when an unexpected event occurs, and how such events influence future learning.

Alexander Panic
Lab: Graybiel Lab
Advisor: Paul DiZio
Location: Rabb
Email: panics@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-2033

Undergraduate Institution:
Technische University Delft

Sacha's primary research interest is how the central nervous system uses visual cues, in addition to vestibular and proprioceptive cues, to produce a sense of spatial orientation. He intends to investigate this during his PhD study.

During his Master's study in Psychology he investigated the process of motor adaptation to unusual force environments, such as altered gravity.

Another research interest is in factors that mediate the experience that people have when interacting with machines. During his Master's study in Man Machine Interaction he investigated how virtual reality based neurocognitive rehabilitation exercises can be designed and engineered so that they explicitly take the patient's motivation into account.

Kenneth Pitts
Area: Brain, Body & Behavior
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Jutta Wolf
Location: Brown 25
Email: kppitts@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-2437

Undergraduate Institute:
University of Massachusetts Lowell

Undergraduate Institution:
SUNY, Fredonia

Mike's research focuses on examining anxiety and the biological markers of stress from a social-developmental perspective. He studies both antecedents to stress reactivity, such as trait vulnerability and situational demands, as well as consequences of stress on physical and cognitive health. Mike also does work in the Rohleder/Wolf Health Psychology wetlab, helping to prepare saliva and blood for analysis.

Marjena Popovic
Lab: Visual Information Processing & Learning Laboratory
Advisor: József Fiser
Location: Volen 220
Email: marjenap@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3292

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Novi Sad

Marjena is interested in understanding the nature of internal representations in humans. There is increasing evidence that internal representations include uncertainty about sensory stimuli. She is interested in finding out if such representations of uncertainty exist in low levels of visual processing and if they are probabilistic in nature. She approaches this issue from two perspectives: She conducts human behavioral experiments aiming to show that humans represent low-level visual stimuli alongside the uncertainty associated with them, and carries out electrophysiological and intrinsic signal imaging experiments using both anesthetized and behaving animals to explore the underlying neural coding of such representations.

Carrie Robertson
Area: Social Development
Lab: Knight Lab
Advisor: Raymond Knight
Location: Brown 15
Email: carrob@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3298

Undergraduate Institution:
Kenyon College

Carrie is interested in looking at the characteristics of psychopathic and sadistic sexual offenders. For her Master’s thesis, Carrie addressed the predictive nature of the psychopathy facets and sadism in both sexual and non-sexual violence.

Undergraduate Institution:
Stonehill College

Nicole is interested in studying factors that promote healthy aging and enable older adults to maintain physical and cognitive functioning. Her current project is focused on memory changes in older adults and looking at the use of self-referencing to improve source memory. 

Undergraduate Institution:
Guilford College

Emily is interested in the universality and cultural specificity of the perception of nonverbal emotion as conveyed through multiple channels. Her past projects have examined how measures of emotion decoding ability and emotional intelligence predict performance in decoding emotion cues in body movement, as well as how gender association strength (GAS) affects the processing of emotion cues at different levels of stimulus ambiguity.

Nikolaus Skogsberg
Area: Social Development
Lab: Emotion Lab
Advisor: Derek Isaacowitz
Location: Volen 304
Email: njs@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3240

Undergraduate Institution:
Western Washington University

Nikolaus' research interests broadly lie in social psychology, with the aim of examining ways to enhance well-being. His work here has revolved around the link between emotion and well-being (subjective mood), with a current project focusing on age differences in a specific process of emotion regulation.

Salom Teshale
Area: Social Development
Lab: Lifespan Lab
Advisor: Margie Lachman
Location: Brown 318
Email: salom@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3208

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Chicago

Julianna Bednar
Lab: Lifespan Lab
Advisor: Margie Lachman
Location: Brown 318
Email: jbednar@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3208

Undergraduate Institution:
Saint Anselm College

Leanne Beliveau
Advisor: Xiaodong Liu
Location: Lemberg 115
Email: lb134060@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3285

Undergraduate Institution:
Endicott College

Keyi Cai
Advisor: Xiaodong Liu
Location: Lemberg 115
Email: caiky@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3285

Undergraduate Institution:
Ohio State University

Jared Chase
Lab: Emotion Lab
Advisor: Derek Isaacowitz
Location: Brown 319
Email: jachase@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3248

Undergraduate Institution:
Vassar College

Yang Chen
Lab: Visual Information Processing & Learning Laboratory
Advisor: Jozsef Fiser
Location: Volen 220
Email: chenyang@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3292

Undergraduate Institution:
Beijing Normal University

Alexander Fiksdal
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Nicolas Rohleder
Location: Lemberg 112
Email: fiksdala@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3147

Undergraduate Institution:
Carleton College

Ashley Geiger
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Jutta Wolf
Location: Brown 25
Email: ageiger@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-2437

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Arizona

Sylvia Guillory
Lab: Visual, Cognition & Neuroscience
Advisor: Robert Sekuler
Location: Volen 245
Email: sguillor@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3266

Undergraduate Institution:
University of California, Los Angeles

Luke Hanlin
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Nicolas Rohleder
Location: Lemberg 112
Email:  lhanlin@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3147

Undergraduate Institution:
  Purdue University

Suzanne Hillman
Lab:  Zebrowitz Lab
Advisor: Leslie Zebrowitz
Location: Brown 18c
Email: shillman@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3294

Undergraduate Institution:
University of New Hampshire

Sarah Huff
Lab: Aging, Culture & Cognition
Advisor: Angela Gutchess
Location: Brown 319
Email: shuff@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3248

Undergraduate Institution:
Colorado College

Chad Nussinow
Lab: Aging, Culture & Cognition
Advisor: Angela Gutchess
Location: Lemberg 112
Email: cnussino@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3147

Undergraduate Institution:
Colby Sawyer College

Juliette Saltz
Lab: Health Psychology Lab
Advisor: Nicolas Rohleder
Location: Brown 319
Email: jsaltz@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3248

Undergraduate Institution:
Rutgers University

Zachary P. Smith
Advisor: Jerome Wodinsky
Location: Lemberg 115
Email: zpsmith@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3285

Undergraduate Institution:
Florida Southern College

Undergraduate Institution:
Merrimack College

Undergraduate Institution:
Wenzhou Medical College

Brian Tolles

Undergraduate Institution:
Hofstra University

Jonathan Watson
Lab: Knight Lab
Advisor: Raymond Knight
Location: Brown 15
Email: jawatson@brandeis.edu
Phone: 781-736-3298

Undergraduate Institution:
Washington University

Undergraduate Institution:
University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point