Craig Abbey

Researcher

Vision and Image Understanding Lab

Elizabeth Agey

Postdoctoral Researcher

Nicole Alea Albada

Associate Teaching Professor

Andy Alexander

Assistant Professor

Beyzanur Arican Dinc

Graduate Student

Beyza's research focuses on how we can develop and maintain healthy relationships and how our social ties can enhance our well-being through interpersonal emotion regulation.

Greg Ashby

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Professor Ashby is interested in the basic cognitive and neural mechanisms that mediate human learning. His approach combines experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and mathematical modeling. Dynamical Neuroscience

Nadezhda Barbashova

Graduate Student

Cora Baron

Graduate Student

Cora is primarily interested in how emotions, social identity, and culture influence people's close relationships. She is especially curious about individual differences in support-seeking and caregiving behavior in romantic relationships.

Stephen Baumgart

Research Associate

Alisa Bedrov

Graduate Student

Alisa's research focuses on the interpersonal consequences of keeping and sharing secrets, specifically in regard to closeness, trust, and social utility.

Selin Bekir

Graduate Student

Dylan Benkley

Graduate Student

Dylan is interested in understanding humans' evolved mechanisms for cooperation as well as the evolved social functions of emotions.

Michael Beyeler

Assistant Professor

Computer Science Department, Dynamical Neuroscience

Henry Biedron

Graduate Student

Henry Biedron's research focus investigates questions concerning motivated social cognition, collective action, intergroup relations, and social justice. He hopes to study how moral evaluations and system justifying motivations might influence collective actions such as strikes and protests.

Jim Blascovich

Distinguished Professor Emeritus/Research Professor

Tom Bullock

Assistant Project Scientist

Attention Lab

Stevie Bullock

Research Participation Pool Coordinator

Oversees Research Participation Pool for researchers use. Oversees front office, distributes mails, manages copy account codes and provides back up to Financial Area. Manages Letters of Recommendation Service.

Ryan Alejandro Cabrera

Graduate Student

Ryan is primarily interested in animal models of drug addiction to inform addiction etiology and treatment. More specifically, his research examines the influence of AMPA and NMDA-types of glutamate receptors in stimulant drug (methamphetamine, cocaine) addiction and incubation of craving.

Jessica Cahill

Senior Undergraduate Advisor

Manages Undergraduate Advising.  Provides administrative assistance for pre-major and full major courses. Edits and reviews student schedules. Presents at informational workshops and participates in campus tabling events.

Fernando Cano

Graduate Student

Fernando's research focuses on examining the neurobiological mechanisms that underpin the incubation of drug craving. He uses operant-conditiong paradigms and conducts immunoblot studies to investigate potential sex differences in 1) cue-elicted responding tasks and 2) the biomolecular correlates during this incubation of drug craving phenomenon. Fernando graduated with a B.S in Biological Sciences from the University of California, Irvine in 2018. He graduated with a M.S in Biology from the California State University of Los Angeles in 2020.

Tikal Catena

Graduate Student

Carly Chak

Graduate Student

Carly is broadly interested in attentional priority within working memory. Using electroencephalography (EEG), her current research explores how different components of attentional capture modulate the contents of working memory over time. She is also interested in understanding how working memory representations might be further modulated when these different components compete for attentional priority.

Qianqian Chen

Junior Specialist

Amber Xuqian Chen

Graduate Student

Amber studies how individuals' biases and social behaviors might emerge into a collective phenomenon through the lens of morality, utilizing the combination of neuroimaging and big data analytics.

Emma Cimino

Jr. Specialist

Laila Elgamiel

Financial Analyst

Oversees procurement and reimbursement process, reconciles all financial accounts, and provides support to the Contracts & Grants Manager.

Nancy Collins

Professor

Daniel Conroy-Beam

Associate Professor

Dan uses an evolutionary perspective to examine human mating psychology. He combines computer simulations with studies of real couples to help understand the nature of mate preferences, mate choice, and romantic relationships.

Leda Cosmides

Distinguished Professor

Ashley J. Coventry

Graduate Student

Ashley's research examines human relationships and mate preferences using an evolutionary psychological framework. She is primarily focused on examining these preferences in LGBTQ+ and consensually non-monogamous populations.

Lee Qianqian Cui

Graduate Student

Broadly, Lee is interested in the dynamics of perceiving others in various social contexts, and how biased attitudes and evaluations can impact, and be impacted by, this process. She's also interested in how AI techniques can perceive this process and to what extent they are biased to certain social groups when perceiving humans.

Cynthia Delgado

Graduate Student

Neil Dundon

Associate Project Scientist

Courtney Durdle

Graduate Student

Miguel Eckstein

Distinguished Professor

James Elliott

Assistant Project Scientist

Nicole Emmons

Graduate Student

Nicole's research employs electrical-based aptamer sensors to enable highly temporally resolved measurements of drug distribution within physiological compartments, including the subcutaneous space and the brain.

Aaron Ettenberg

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Behavioral, pharmacological and physiological manipulations are combined in attempts to understand the nature of the brain mechanisms subserving the reinforcing effects of food, water, sex and psychoactive drugs.

Sierra Feasel

Graduate Student

Guillem Fernández Villà

Graduate Student

Guillem is interested in how acculturation processes occur at societal and individual levels, and how they can be facilitated in a way that supports people's wellbeing.

John Foley

Professor Emeritus/Research Professor

Alan Fridlund

Professor

Shelly Gable

Professor and Chair

Anusha Garg

Graduate Student

Anusha's research focuses on validating and using the Think Aloud method to study the stream of consciousness, including its contents, structure, and qualities of thoughts.

Jordan Garrett

Graduate Student

Michael Gazzaniga

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Benjamin Gelbart

Graduate Student

Tamsin German

Professor

W. Connor Gibbs

Graduate Student

Connor's research is broadly about transitions and change. His work includes research on veterans transition to civilian employment and cultural implications for changes in personal control.

Barry Giesbrecht

Professor

1) To understand the neural mechanisms of cognitive priority control in attention and working memory. 2) To understand the impact of global physiological states on cognition. 3) To use brain activity to decode cognitive states and augment performance. Dynamical Neuroscience

Hayley Giffin

Graduate Student

Hayley's main research interest is the impact of culture on social relationships and decision making, especially between individuals with different cultural identities. She is also interested in sustainability, well-being, and group dynamics.

Michael Goard

Associate Professor

Diego Gonzalez

Graduate Student

Juan Gonzalez

Assistant Specialist

Scott Grafton

Distinguished Professor

Dr. Grafton supports an interdisciplinary research program at the interface of learning theory, the organization of skilled action, network science, and multimodal brain imaging.

Hannah Grotzinger

Graduate Student

Hannah's research uses dense-sampling and neuroimaging methods to study the impact of endogenous sex hormone fluctuations on brain function.

Goirik Gupta

Graduate Student

Justin Haiman

Graduate Student

Justin's research examines the stochastic processes that guide serotonergic axon growth. He uses primary neuronal cultures and other advanced experimental techniques to accomplish his work.

John Hajda

Associate Director, Sage Center for the Study of the Mind

Coordinates Sage Center Lecture Series. Oversees the Junior Research Fellowship post-doctoral program. Promotes the public image of the Sage Center. Works in with the Chair and faculty of the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Dynamical Neuroscience to promote the program and find and apply for funding sources.

David Hamilton

Distinguished Professor Emeritus / Research Professor

Nicole Han

Graduate Student

Nicole's research focuses on human and machine visual intelligence in tasks such as face recognition, gaze perception, and gaze-following. She's also interested in applying AI models to support human performance in relevant visual tasks.

Paige Harris

Graduate Student

Amelia Haruka Harrison

Graduate Student

Amelia is interested in understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with manipulation of visual attention by studying behavior in tandem with functional brain data.

Carol He

Graduate Student

Carol's research is primarily about spatial navigation in immersive virtual reality and in real world. Leveraging statistical modeling, she highlights individual differences (sex, age, etc.) in using VR and GPS to do different spatial tasks.

Mary Hegarty

Distinguished Professor

Kevin Honeywell

Graduate Student

Jocelyn Huerta

Graduate Student

Laura Huerta Sanchez

Graduate Student

Allesandra Iadipaolo

Graduate Student

Allesandra is interested in using neuroimaging methods to investigate the relationships between sex steroid hormones, cognition, and brain structure/function in the context of health conditions impacting women (e.g., depression, anxiety, chronic pain, endometriosis).

Bailey Immel

Graduate Student

Joe Jablonski

Development Engineer

Manages departmental machine shop. Fabricates and repairs equipment. Oversees shipping and receiving and departmental key assignments. Manages departmental equipment inventory.

Jerry Jacobs

Research Professor, Distinguished Professor Emeritus

The biological basis of mammalian (especially, primate) color vision and its evolution.

Emily Jacobs

Associate Professor

Dr. Jacobs' research pairs endocrinology and brain imaging techniques to determine the impact of sex steroid hormones on brain morphology and function. Neuroscience Research Institute, Feminist Futures Initiative

Skirmantas Janusonis

Associate Professor

Dr. Janusonis studies serotonergic and other stochastic axon systems, with a focus on comparative neurobiology and computational neuroscience.

Leo Jimenez Chavez

Graduate Student

Byron Johnson

Graduate Student

Kaya Jordan

Junior Specialist

Srijita Karmakar

Graduate Student

Srijita is interested in how humans perform complex visual perceptual tasks (such as, gaze-following) in an automatic and efficient manner, and how and why humans and AI differ in such seemingly simple visual tasks.

Madhuri Kashyap

Graduate Student

Ron Keiflin

Assistant Professor

Our lab studies the neurobehavioral basis of associative learning and decision-making (adaptive and maladaptive). We use sophisticated behavioral tasks in rodents, in combination with modern tools to monitor and manipulate neural activity.

Heejung Kim

Professor

Heejung Kim investigates cultural influences on psychological processes, and their implications for important real life outcomes, such as health, education, immigration, and policy support.

Tod Kippin

Professor and Vice Chair

Stan Klein

Professor

Devi Klein

Graduate Student

Regina Lapate

Assistant Professor

Dr. Lapate investigates the mechanisms and neural circuitry underlying emotional processing, awareness, and emotion regulation. Her multi-modal approach includes recordings of peripheral physiology, brain imaging, and non-invasive brain stimulation.

Evan Layher

Postdoctoral Researcher

Margo Le

Graduate Student

Gillian Leibelt

Senior Undergraduate Advisor

Manages Undergraduate Advising.  Provides administrative assistance for pre-major and full major courses. Edits and reviews student schedules. Presents at informational workshops and participates in campus tabling events.

Suyi Leong

Graduate Student

Suyi is primarily interested in how culture influence people's likelihood of engaging in behaviors that compromise self-interest but benefit a collective (e.g., engaging in pro-environmental actions)

Sara Leslie

Graduate Student

Sara's research examines confidence and metacognition in the context of decision-making and memory, investigating their cognitive and neural bases and the interplay of confidence with choice.

Mengsi Li

Graduate Student

Mengsi is interested in the neural underpinnings of emotion and emotional memory in complex real-world episodes. Her current research focuses on the interactions of emotion and temporal coding (time perception and temporal memory) and their implications for emotional wellbeing.

Luna Li

Graduate Student

Luna is interested in reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty.

Yanming (Alison) Li

Graduate Student

Alison’s research focuses how internal information (e.g., goal or memory) influences the encoding of visual information, and the subjective, involuntary nature of conscious perception.

Zoe Liberman

Associate Professor

Zoe Liberman studies infants and children to learn about the origins and developmental trajectory of humans' understanding of the social world. Her research is at the intersection of developmental and social psychology.

Jack Loomis

Professor Emeritus

Shannon M. Lopez

Graduate Student

Shannon is primarily interested in how the effects of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) influence changes in behavior and neurocircuitry.

Katherine Lowe

Graduate Advisor

Coordinates recruitment, admissions and orientation for incoming graduate students. Responsible for all aspects of employment of graduate students. Provides advising to graduate students. Maintains graduate databases.

Loy Lytle

Professor Emeritus

Ava (Qingting) Ma de Sousa

Graduate Student

Broadly, Ava's work examines social identity, intergroup relations, and emotion using social psychological, neuroscientific and computational methods.

Diane Mackie

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Research in the Social Evaluations and Emotions lab focuses on the evaluations, emotions, attitudes, and norms that arise from social group membership and underpin a wide range of phenomena in intergroup relations and social influence.

Parsa Madinei

Graduate Student

Brenda Major

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Impact of perceived ethnic, gender, and weight-based stigma and discrimination on psychological stress, health behaviors, and interpersonal relationships. Resilience. Impact of diversity, diversity policies, and anti-bias norms on intergroup relations.

Amedee Martella

Postdoctoral Researcher

Richard Mayer

Distinguished Professor

educational psychology, cognitive psychology, multimedia learning, online learning, computer-based instruction, learning with games and virtual reality, learning strategies and study skills, science and mathematics education, animated pedagogical agents

Christopher McFerron

Student Affairs Manager

Manages Undergraduate and Graduate Affairs Offices. Provides advising to students, prepares schedule of courses for academic year including summer session. Prepares TA assignments.

Hossein Mehrzadfar

Graduate Student

Hossein’s research focuses on understanding the similarities and differences between humans and Deep Learning models in scene understanding and visual attention.

Leo Mejia

Graduate Student

Mario Mendoza

MRI Research Technologist

Manages the operation and maintenance of the ultra high-field MRI scanner at the UCSB Brain Imaging Center. Coordinates research procedures for investigators, oversees all imaging protocols including troubleshooting and planning and initiates new techniques as prescribed by the Director. Provides scanner operator and safety training for graduate students, post-docs, faculty and staff.

Michael Miller

Professor

Michael Mrazek

Research Associate

Mitch Munns

Graduate Student

Mitch's research involves the connection between spatial thinking and learning abstract information, such as representing a complex lecture with a diagram.

Elle Murata

Graduate Student

Elle’s research probes the neuromodulatory impact of sex steroid hormones on brain morphology, connectivity, and cognition.

Shravan Murlidaran

Graduate Student

Mesude Okhan

Junior Specialist

Josh Ortega

Graduate Student

Josh’s research explores the psychology of art and dreams, and how these domains can contribute to a richer understanding of creativity.

Diego Padilla Garcia

Graduate Student

Viki Papadakis

Graduate Student

Sophie Peterson

Graduate Student

Sophie's research investigates the neural mechanisms involved in context-dependent reward prediction and decision making.

David Pietraszewski

Assistant Professor

David uses evolutionary, developmental, and social perspectives to study the nature of human social group representations and explores how evolutionary psychology may aid the meta-science and reform movements in psychology.

Liz Quinn-Jensen

Graduate Student

Kyle Ratner

Associate Professor

Kyle Ratner investigates face processing in an intergroup context and the consequences of social perception for mental and physical health. His research uses theories and methods from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., fMRI, EEG).

Ben Reese

Research Professor, Professor Emeritus

Neuroscience Research Institute

Nils Karl Reimer

Assistant Professor

Russ Revlin

Research Professor, Associate Professor Emeritus

Shannon Rivard

Business Officer

Oversees and manages all departmental functions. Provides direction and support to faculty and staff regarding space, budget, equipment, lab renovation student affairs, curriculum plans, facilities management, and special projects.

James Roney

Professor

John M. Ruiz

Visitor

Kiana Sabugo

Brain Imaging Center Administrative Assistant

Manages scheduling, billing, and safety training.

Rammy Salem

Graduate Student

Tyler Santander

Assistant Project Scientist

Jonathan Schooler

Distinguished Professor

The Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential

Samantha Scudder

Assistant Teaching Professor

Oya Serbest

Graduate Student

Oya is primarily interested in how multilingual environments shape children's understanding of social groups and the roots of stereotyping based on religious ideologies.

Shivang Shelat

Graduate Student

Shivang's research centers on spontaneous cognition (i.e., mind-wandering) and how it affects memory, perception, and attention. He also applies principles in attention neuroscience to optimize human-computer interactions.

David Sherman

Professor

Social Climate Science Lab

Henri Etel Skinner

Graduate Student

Henri researches the attentional and decision making processes involved in our ability to sustain attention.

Ikuko Smith

Assistant Professor

Shreya Sodhi

Graduate Student

Shreya's research examines how children reason about and use various social categories. Currently, her work focuses on how children conceptualize national identity and immigration.

Carlos Sosa Colindres

Graduate Student

Thomas Sprague

Assistant Professor

My work uses computational methods applied to noninvasive human neuroimaging (fMRI; EEG) to understand how neural processing of visual information changes across manipulations of attention, working memory, and eye movements.

Joanne Stasiak

Graduate Student

Joanne’s research employs psychophysiological methods to examine the processes underlying awareness of emotional responding with the goal of identifying the various cues individuals use to form perceptions of and understand their complex affective experiences.

Karen Szumlinski

Professor

Dr. Szumlinski’s major research interest concerns the biochemical mechanisms underlying the changes in brain and behavior produced by chronic exposure to drugs of abuse.

Caitlin Taylor

Assistant Project Scientist

As a postdoctoral fellow in the Jacobs Lab, Caitlin uses MRI to investigate the effects of oral contraceptive use on the brain, as well to study the effects of sex hormones on the hippocampus.

Daniel Thayer

Graduate Student

Lexie Topete

Graduate Student

Lexie's research primarily focuses on large scale spatial cognition/navigation ability, and various factors associated with our ability to acquire spatial knowledge of an environment (e.g., GPS use, endocrine aging, and environment structure).

Giavanna Tudish

Contracts and Grants Manager

Manages departmental financial affairs including departmental budget and extra mural funds. Processes payroll for departmental personnel. Administers Contracts and Grants including proposal preparation.

Lily Turkstra

Graduate Student

Lily’s research interests include the neuropsychological components of vision loss, prosthetic vision rehabilitation strategies, and accessibility design.

Miriam Urie

Graduate Student

Miriam is interested in optimal ways to build and maintain transferable, long-term knowledge in the minds of learners.

Katy Walter

Postdoctoral Researcher

Kayla Wang

Graduate Student

Kayla is primarily interested in exploring the utility of EAB (Electrochemical Aptamer-Based) sensors for neuropharmacology in rodents, in the hopes of getting a better understanding of addiction models and underlying circuitry.

Jingyi Wang

Postdoctoral Researcher

Rene Weber

Professor

Rene Weber is a media psychologist and investigates complex cognitive responses to media communication with an emphasis on the neural mechanisms of moral judgment, persuasion, media violence, cognitive control, and flow experiences.

Annie E. Wertz

Assistant Professor

Pamela Wilks

Academic Personnel Manager

Oversees faculty personnel cases including merits and promotions and appointments. Manages faculty recruitment, Kronos Timecards and Payroll. Hires new visiting researchers and other visitors. 

Brandon Woo

Assistant Professor

Vanessa Woods

Associate Teaching Professor

Vanessa Woods looks at factors that affect traditionally underrepresented groups success in educational settings, which includes studying pedagogical practices that create equity in large college classes.

Vinnie Wu

Graduate Student

Chuyi Yang

Graduate Student

Chuyi is broadly interested in how children conceptualize and understand their many social relationships. More specifically, Chuyi is interested in how children conceptualize nuanced friendships and how these conceptualizations influence prosocial and antisocial behavior.

Asa Young

Graduate Student

Asa's research focuses are in the mapping of neural oscillations, their variability, and relationship to other oscillations across scales as relevant to phenomenological experience.

Hongbo Yu

Assistant Professor

Dr. Yu combines behavioral experiments, neuroscience and computational modeling to understand the relationship between emotion (e.g., guilt, gratitude) and morality and their neural representations.

Lu Zang

Graduate Student

Lu’s research examines how future time perspective, as an individual difference and cultural orientation, is mediated by construal level in shaping human relations, and well-being outcomes.

Shangcheng Zhao

Graduate Student

Shangcheng's primary interest lies in understanding the mechanisms and consequences of social learning, particularly how social impressions evolve dynamically during social interactions and how individuals learn to adapt their behavior in new environments.

Fangzheng Zhao

Graduate Student

Fangzheng's research is dedicated to integrating cognitive psychology theories into multimedia learning platforms, such as video lessons and instructional games.

Shane Zheng

Desktop Support

Provides desktop and user support for the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences.

Mable Zhou

Graduate Student

Mable is interested in using virtual reaility technologies (head mounted display, omnidirectional treadmill) to study individual differences in navigation abilities.