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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

José Chavira

Graduate Student

José is interested in the neural mechanisms underpinning learning, memory, and decision-making.

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.

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

Courtney Durdle

Graduate Student

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.

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.

Anusha Garg

Graduate Student

Jordan Garrett

Graduate Student

Benjamin Gelbart

Graduate Student

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.

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.

Diego Gonzalez

Graduate Student

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.

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.

Kevin Honeywell

Graduate Student

Jocelyn Huerta

Graduate Student

Laura Huerta Sanchez

Graduate Student

Bailey Immel

Graduate Student

Leo Jimenez Chavez

Graduate Student

Byron Johnson

Graduate Student

Srijita Karmakar

Graduate Student

Madhuri Kashyap

Graduate Student

Devi Klein

Graduate Student

Alyssa Lawson

Graduate Student

Alyssa is a PhD candidate in The Mayer Lab for Research on Learning and Instruction. She is interested in understanding what helps and hinders learning, as well as individual differences that influence learning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Parsa Madinei

Graduate Student

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.

Anne Milner

Graduate Student

Anne's research focuses on how stimuli that are associated with reward can rapidly capture attention and are prioritized in visual attention.

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

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.

Laura Pritschet

Graduate Student

Laura’s research investigates how sex steroid hormones (e.g., estrogen, progesterone) shape human brain structure, function, and cognition via brain imaging techniques.

Liz Quinn-Jensen

Graduate Student

Rammy Salem

Graduate Student

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.

Henri Etel Skinner

Graduate Student

Henri's research focuses on sustained attention by investigating the oscillatory electroencephalography (EEG) activity associated with attentional lapses and the vigilance decrement.

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

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.

Daniel Thayer

Graduate Student

Lexie Topete

Graduate Student

Lexie's interest is in spatial cognition, with an emphasis on how technological developments (like GPS and virtual environments) may influence the acquisition and maintenance of spatial ability and navigation. She is also interested in understanding how various individual differences play a mediating role in the development of effective spatial strategies.

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

Graduate Student

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.

Delancey Wu

Graduate Student

Delancey's research examines how close relationship processes, such as perceived responsiveness and social support, are moderated by different cultural values, and how cultural orientation impacts our perceptions and well-being in relationships.

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.

Shuying Yu

Graduate Student

Shuying's research investigates the role of sex steroid hormones on the neural circuitry that supports spatial navigation in midlife women and men.

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.

Fangzheng Zhao

Graduate Student

Fangzheng's research investigates the effectiveness of various designs, such as emotional designs and virtual instructors, on students' learning experiences and performance. She also explores the individual difference and most effective generative strategies in multimedia learning.