• The study of brain-behavior relationships in the context of aging and age-related neurodegenerative disease.
• Use of univariate and multivariate network analysis techniques with multiple neuroimaging methods and measures.
• Measuring of neuropsychological function, health status, and genetic risk to understand how these factors interact to influence cognitive function as we age

Updated: 07/05/22

• Etiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders.
• Risk factors for depression using measures of central and autonomic nervous system function -  especially EEG, resting state fMRI connectivity, and cardiac vagal control.
• Development of novel and neurally-informed treatments for mood and anxiety disorders - including Transcranial Ultrasound, EEG biofeedback, and Transcranial Direct Current and Transcranial Alternating Current.
• The most recent work has focused specifically on two lines of work:
  • Investigating transcranial ultrasound as a neuromodulation approach to alter emotional well-being, with the ultimate aim to provide a novel treatment for depression.
  • Assessing the potential utility of guided psilocybin experience to alter brain network activity, and to improve symptoms and function in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
• Joint appointments with Cognitive Science and Neuroscience 

Updated: 07/05/22

• Personalized and Precision Treatment

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

• Digital Mental Health Interventions

• Treatment Processes/Mechanisms

• Intensive Longitudinal Data (Ecological Momentary Assessment / Passive Sensing / Digital Phenotyping)

Updated: 09/15/23

• Social networks and health
• Social and structural factors influencing health disparities
• Latina/o/x health
• Quantitative methods
• Biopsychosocial model of health

Updated: 12/20/23

• Neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience of memory, imagination, and associated cognitive disorders (e.g., amnesia).
• Individual differences in autobiographical thought.
• Cognitive and brain aging.
• Alzheimer’s disease.
• Novel approaches to neuropsychological assessment.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Broadly focused on psychosocial and behavioral responses across the cancer control spectrum, including early detection and survivorship.
• Particular focus on cancer health equity.
• Focused on improving cancer care outcomes through patient-centered interventions, including navigation and psychosocial care.
• Conceptualized and developed interventions to address stigma among individuals with lung cancer, and explored sociocultural mechanisms of resilience in the context of lung cancer.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Neurobiological bases of PTSD and anxiety-related psychopathology

• Fear learning and memory

• Functional and structural MRI

• Impact of socioenvironmental context (e.g., community violence) on brain health and function

• Intersections between cognitive and emotional processes

Updated: 09/12/23 

• Grief, loss and social stress research
• Using methods of psychoneuroimmunology, neuroimaging, autonomic physiology, and virtual reality.
• Particular interest in collective grief in the American Black/Latinx community, and bereavement as a health disparity.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Investigate how social lives constitute both risk and resilience for physical health.
• Emphasis on racial/ethnic and cultural differences in the above effects.
• Use of a variety of methods including community and hospital-based observational studies, surveys, ecological momentary assessment, ambulatory psychophysiology, and laboratory based paradigms.
• The lab’s current foci include studies of stress and cardiovascular risk, as well as the Hispanic Health Paradox.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Neurological basis of memory and memory disorders, aging and memory, and risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Social relationships and health, as well as stress and health - including: divorce, marital separation, loneliness.
• Genetically-informed research – including: twin studies, polygenic risk scores, and Mendelian Randomization
• Quantitative methods for the analysis of change
• Open science

Updated: 07/05/22

• Behavioral sleep medicine broadly
• Improving the measurement of sleep - both subjectively and objectively - and relating sleep changes to biomarker (e.g., inflammatory, genetic, cardiovascular) changes.
• Specific interests in the epidemiology and treatment of insomnia comorbid with other conditions and consequences of shiftwork.
  • Examining sleep and mental health disparities, as well as developing culturally responsive insomnia and other behavioral sleep medicine interventions.
• More recently focused on documenting and improving the sleep of military, first responder, healthcare workers and Pac-12 athletes.
• Ongoing observation studies:
  • Suicide Risk and Sleep in Treatment
  • Mental Health in Pac-12 Athletes
  • Daily Associations Between Sleep and Mental Health in Pac-12 Athletes
• Ongoing treatment studies:
  • An Efficient Treatment for Posttraumatic Injury for Firefighters
  • Web-Based Provider Training for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Nightmares (CBTn)
  • Tele-CBTi in middle-aged and older adults, with inflammatory and cognitive aging outcomes.

Updated: 07/08/22

• Visual perception, attention, and medical image perception.
• Visual search: From theory to applied with student and radiologist observers
• Utilizing behavioral, eye tracking, and electroencephalogram (EEG) research methods.
• Exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts how search performance.
• *Joint appointments in Psychology and Medical Imaging

Updated: 11/05/24 

• The study of brain-behavior relationships in the context of aging and age-related neurodegenerative disease.
• Use of univariate and multivariate network analysis techniques with multiple neuroimaging methods and measures.
• Measuring of neuropsychological function, health status, and genetic risk to understand how these factors interact to influence cognitive function as we age

Updated: 07/05/22

• Etiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders.
• Risk factors for depression using measures of central and autonomic nervous system function -  especially EEG, resting state fMRI connectivity, and cardiac vagal control.
• Development of novel and neurally-informed treatments for mood and anxiety disorders - including Transcranial Ultrasound, EEG biofeedback, and Transcranial Direct Current and Transcranial Alternating Current.
• The most recent work has focused specifically on two lines of work:
  • Investigating transcranial ultrasound as a neuromodulation approach to alter emotional well-being, with the ultimate aim to provide a novel treatment for depression.
  • Assessing the potential utility of guided psilocybin experience to alter brain network activity, and to improve symptoms and function in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
• Joint appointments with Cognitive Science and Neuroscience 

Updated: 07/05/22

• Internally-guided processes spanning self-referential thinking, memory, future thinking, emotion, and mentalizing.
• Mind-wandering, imagination and creativity.
• Neural and physiological underpinnings of internally-guided cognition & resting state connectivity.
• Changes in internally-guided cognition in aging and dementia.
• Dysfunctional thoughts in mental health disorders (i.e. depression & anxiety). 
• Joint appointments in Psychology and Cognitive Science.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Behavioral and systems neuroscience, aging, memory, hippocampus.
• Joint appointments with the Department of Neurology, Bio5, ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging and Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Language and cognition, including learning, music, sentence processing, reading, and cerebral asymmetries in humans and animals.
• Joint appointment with Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Neuroscience.

Updated: 07/05/22

• The impact of early maternal care on later cognition, temperament, and life outcomes
• Developmental and genetic bases of individual differences in dog behavior and cognition, especially as related to and shaped by interactions with humans
• Age-related cognitive decline
• Cognitive and behavioral characteristics of successful working dogs

Updated: 09/06/21

• Focused primarily on the cognitive and clinical neuroscience of aging and mild cognitive impairment.
• Particularly interested in integrating brain imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) techniques to develop image-guided therapeutic TMS protocols.
• Explore TMS-derived and image-based biomarkers for early diagnosis and prediction of therapeutic outcomes for individuals with mild cognitive impairment and healthy older adults.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Understanding how the coordinated activities of groups of neurons and the release of dopamine in the brain contribute to learning, memory consolidation during sleep, and navigation.
• Exploring how communication between neurons is disrupted in aging and Parkinson’s disease.
• Development of novel instrumentation for visualizing and modulating brain activity, measuring dopamine release, and quantifying behavior to further the above research objectives.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Spatial navigation as a fundamental aspect of everyday life, yet something that declines in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions like stroke.
• Employment of techniques like high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), encephalography (EEG), and patient work to understand the neural mechanisms underlying spatial memories.
• Inter-disciplinary research with  foundations in computer science (via virtual reality and neural networks), geographical science, cognitive science, linguistics, neurology, neurosurgery, and others.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Establishing the logic used by the circadian pacemaker to interpret multidimensional light patterns
• Understanding the psychology associated with nighttime wakefulness and its role in suicide risk
• Identifying and understanding the significance of circadian fluctuations in real-world data
• Analysis of important topics in sleep and circadian science

Updated: 09/22/22

• Early language development with emphasis on language structure (phonology and syntax).
• Comparison of language structure learning in infants and adults.
• Comparison of language and music development.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Learning and memory development in infants and young children.
• Language development in infants and young children.
• The role of sleep in memory formation in infants and young children.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Temporal awareness and time perception, as well as action agency and intentionality.  
• Understanding how the above cognitive processes are essential to our daily lives, juxtaposed with the currently limited understanding of how they operate and how they may be altered or compromised under different mental or health states. 
• Employing techniques such as EEG, eye tracking, and TMS to observe the psychological and neural mechanisms of the above cognitive processes. 

Updated: 07/05/22

• Figurative language: How do people comprehend metaphors, irony, and idioms? What is the role of metaphor in embodied cognition? Can metaphors help abstract, science concept learning? What are the social-affective functions of metaphors and irony? 
• Emotion and language: How is emotion encoded in language? How do language activities such as reading give rise to emotion? How do readers’ mood states influence meaning making in language? Do older adults understand and produce emotional language differently from younger adults?
• Language and thought: Do the language(s) we speak influence how we perceive and reason about the world?

Updated: 09/19/22

• Mechanisms through which animals represent and reason about the world. 
• How research on dog behavior, cognition, genetics, and neuroendocrinology can improve the processes through which dogs are selected, bred, and trained for roles in society. 
• Biological mechanisms of human-animal-interaction, with a focus on the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin.

Updated: 07/27/23

• Bilingualism, second language acquisition, comprehension and production of native and second languages
• Methods include eye-tracking and brain imaging.
• Also interested in Positive Psychology.
• Joint appointments with Cognitive Science and Linguistics. Member of Graduate Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching.

Updated: 07/05/22

• The interdependence of cognitive and normative approaches to decision making.
• Linguistic theory – notably: lexical semantics, the theory of concepts, and the biological foundations of language.
• Joint appointments in Cognitive Science and Linguistics.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Neurological basis of memory and memory disorders, aging and memory, and risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Updated: 07/05/22

• Psychological implications of our everyday social lives for personality, wellbeing, and health
• Ambulatory assessment and mobile sensing methods; psychological language analysis.

Updated: 11/26/24

• The unique and pervasive ways humans interact with animals.
• Evaluating the effects of human-animal interactions.
•  Classroom-based, animal-assisted intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder.
• Effects of service dogs on veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder and their families.
• Human-Animal Interaction
• Human-Animal Bond
• Animal-Assisted Intervention
• Service Animals
• Dogs
• Psychology

Updated: 08/22/23

• Bi-directional effects of human-animal interactions on human and canine health and wellbeing.
•  Roles of assistance dogs, therapy dogs, and pet dogs for individuals with disabilities or mental health conditions.
• Psychophysiological mechanisms underlying positive human-dog interactions.
• Roles and impacts of the human-animal bond for human and animal health and wellbeing across a variety of settings, populations, and contexts.

Updated: 08/29/23

• Suffering, anxiety, guilt, cultural differences, religion and terror management.

Updated: 07/06/22

• Research that uses psychological theory and empirical research methods (both qualitative and quantitative) to generate evidence that can be applied to real-world legal problems. 
• Focus on policies and procedures. 
  • Examination of the procedures used by colleges and universities to adjudicate sexual misconduct. 
  • Research designed to improve outcomes for delinquent youth by combating bias in treatment and punishment decisions.
• Most interested in improving outcomes by challenging the validity of commonly held beliefs that often support legal decision-making.

Updated: 07/06/22