People

Members of the Poldrack Lab

Principal Investigator

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1995, and spent time as a postdoc at Stanford University and a faculty member at the MGH-NMR Center/Harvard Medical School before landing at UCLA in 2002. I currently hold the Wendell Jeffrey and Bernice Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience.

My research interests are very generally centered around the questions of how new skills are acquired, how existing skills are expressed, and how people exert executive control during thought and behavior. We examine these questions using functional brain imaging techniques, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I am also interested in conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the relation between cognitive and neural processes. Our research is strongly focused on translation of basic cognitive neuroscience into the clinical domain, with collaborations on studies of schizophrenia, ADHD, Tourette Syndrome, and drug addiction.

Russell A. Poldrack

Russ' Curriculum Vitae NIH Biosketch Teaching Photos from my travels My Academic Family Tree

Faculty

	I received my PhD in Biostatistics from the University of Michigan in 2006, where I worked with Tom Nichols on projects involving group BOLD fMRI data analysis as well as single subject Arterial Spin Labeling fMRI. My current focus is on developing a tool that will calculate power for group fMRI experiments, which will be helpful in designing future experiments.
Jeanette Mumford

Before joining the Poldrack lab, I received my PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA in the Bookheimer lab, and went on to a postdoctoral fellowship with Robert Bilder. I currently hold a faculty appointment in Psychiatry. My interests are generally aimed at refining cognitive phenotypes for the study of psychiatric populations. I am particularly interested in the components of cognitive control and how these processes are perturbed in psychotic disorders. Recently I have focused on using informatics techniques to better understand complex phenotypic constructs for use in behavioral and neuroimaging experiments. In my spare time, I'm also the Scientific Project Manager for the Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics.

Fred Sabb

Fred's personal page

Postdocs

I received my PhD from Stony Brook University in 2008, where I worked with Turhan Canli. My dissertation research focused on the neurogenetic bases of impulsivity, specifically response inhibition, in healthy adults. Working in both the Poldrack lab and Nelson Freimer’s Neurobehavioral Genetics lab, I am interested in integrating neuroimaging and genetics to better understand cognitive control, particularly in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders. I will be involved in research that is part of the Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics.

Eliza Congdon

I graduated in Physics from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, in 2003. During my PhD, at University College London, I worked with Karl Friston and James Kilner testing ideas of predictive coding for cortical organization and function with connectivity models for electroencephalographic (EEG) data. I am interested in using connectivity methods to understand the cortical mechanisms underlying perception and decision-making.

Marta Garrido

I received my PhD from Princeton University, working with Jonathan D. Cohen - prior to this I worked with Randy McIntosh at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, my hometown. Broadly, I am interested in delineating the neural interactions that produce efficient behavior. My research combines three complementary aspects of cognition: neural representation of context for cognitive control, functional connectivity (patterns of co-active regions across task/time) and changes in such connectivity observed with learning. In complement to these research aims my analytic approach focuses on multivariate approaches targeting functional connectivity. My web site

Agatha Lenaartowicz

Graduate Students

I am a graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience area. I graduated from Pomona College in 2006 with a double major in Psychology and Music, after which I worked as a research assistant in Jonathan Cohen’s Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Lab at Princeton University. I’m interested in using neuroeconomic paradigms to explore the relationship between cognition and emotion in decision-making.

Emily Barkley-Levenson

I am a graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience area. I graduated from Harvard University in 2002, where I studied psychopathology. After graduating, I moved to Washington, DC, where I worked as a research assistant at the National Institute of Mental Health, in the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch. My research there involved working memory and cognitive control.

I am broadly interested in learning and memory. My current research here at UCLA focuses on the functional neuroimaging of cognitive control, specifically the act of inhibiting an automatic or habitual response to a stimulus.

Jessica Cohen

I too am a graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience area. I was also an undergraduate here at UCLA, receiving a Sc.B. in Cognitive Science with a computing specialization in 2003. My general research interests revolve around the behavioral, computational, and neurological mechanisms that drive expertise acquisition. I am currently exploring the relationships between perception, attention and decision making using psychophysical methodology.

Don Kalar

I'm a graduate student in the cognitive neuroscience area. I received my Sc.B. from Brown University in 2002, after which I worked in Jeremy Wolfe's Visual Attention Lab at Harvard Medical School and in Aude Oliva's Computational Visual Cognition Lab at MIT, studying contextual constraints on visual perception. I am interested in neural mechanisms of cognitive control, and my current project addresses control of memory systems using fMRI.

Naomi Kenner

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Integrative Biology back in 2002. I then headed North to Portland, Oregon where I joined Jacob Raber's Behavioral Neuroscience lab at Oregon Health & Science University. There I studied memory, aging, and cognitive decline. Currently I am a Neuroengineering graduate student at UCLA and my general interests include the mechanisms and maintenance of memory systems and cognitive states.

Angela Rizk-Jackson

	Ajay studied psychology at Trinity University, TX, before pursuing his Ph.D. at UCLA. He is currently in his fifth year and is investigating neural interactions related to anxiety and memory systems. He has diverse research interests spanning the areas of social perception, decision-making, and emotion and cognition.
Ajay Satpute

I am originally from the Washington, DC area and received my B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 2001. After graduating, I spent some time in Boston working on leukemia and lymphoma research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

I came out to Los Angeles in 2003, after working at the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory at Cornell Medical School in New York City. Here at UCLA I am a Cognitive Psychology graduate student, and am currently involved with a study that uses fMRI to explore implicit learning and skill acquisition.

Elena Stover

Staff

I serve as the FUNC system administrator and general computer guy. I completed my Ph.D. in Sociology at UCLA in 1993, specializing in social networks.

I have worked primarily as a programmer/system administrator in scientific computing. While in graduate school I assisted analysis of data from the NASA Pioneer series spacecraft, and have since worked at UCLA in the Institute for Social Science Research supporting telephone interviewing and social psychological experiments, the Computer Science Department studying parallel operating system performance, and Bruin OnLine supporting campus-wide e-mail and name service.

Mark Strohm

I am a lab manager for the Poldrack lab. I moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Indiana University with a B.S. degree in Cognitive Science. At IU, I worked in Thomas James' lab using fMRI techniques to study multi-sensory integration and object recognition. Currently I am involved in a project looking at the relationship between memory and reward systems. Within psychology I am generally interested in memory, fMRI, and perception. I am also interested in artificial intelligence using neural networks and genetic algorithms.

Marisa Geohegan

Lab Alumni

	Adam is now an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of California San Deigo
Adam Aron	Aronlab Web Site

	Fabienne is now a researcher with the UCLA Neurotrauma Group.
Fabienne Cazalis	Fabienne's Personal Page

	Karin is now a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.
Karin Foerde

	Adriana is now a faculty member in the UCLA Department of Psychology, and continues to collaborate with the Poldrack lab on studies of cognitive control in neuropsychiatric disorders.
Adriana Galvan

	Dara is now a research scientist in the UCLA Semel Institute and continues to collaborate with the Poldrack Lab on translational research on addiction.
Dara Ghahremani	Dara's Personal Page

	Niki is now a postdoctoral fellow in human-computer interaction at Carnegie-Mellon University and a visiting researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center. He continues to collaborate with the lab on the Cognitive Atlas project.
Niki Kittur	Niki's Personal Page

	Kelsey is now a graduate student at UC Davis.
Kelsey Laird

	Jun is preparing to go to medical school.
Jun Liu

	Sabrina is now a medical student at Stanford University.
Sabrina Tom

	Chris is now principal at Signal-to-Noise Communications.
Christopher Trepel

	Gui is now a research scientist at the University of Southern California.
Gui Xue

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