Educational Background

• 2012, Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology, Cognition & Brain Science
• 2008, M.S., Georgia Institute of Technology, Experimental Psychology
• 2005, B.A., Cum Laude, State University of New York at Geneseo, Mathematics & Psychology

Research Interests

My research interests include aspects of sensation and perception, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience, developmental psychology, and psychopathology.  My main focus in research combines psychophysical and event-related brain potential (ERP) techniques to investigate neural mechanisms of visual attention.  I am interested in questions such as how do we find a friend at the crowded football match? Or when studying visual search in the laboratory, how do observers detect or discriminate a target object amongst an array of distractor objects?  In another area of research, I have been studying how emotion perception changes with advancing age.  For example, I have used ERPs to investigate the shift older adults often experience towards focusing on positive emotions and avoiding negative emotions.  I have also been interested in examining changes that occur with treatment of depression.  For example, in an ongoing collaboration with colleagues at Emory University, I have been examining how deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression changes emotional self-perception using both behavioral and ERP techniques.