Research Opportunities in Neuroscience at Brooklyn College
Research experience and training are available in the laboratories of the following faculty members:
Israel Abramov
Areas of Expertise: Israel Abramov studies the visual system across the life span, using psychophysical methods to understand the underlying biology. He and his collaborators measure spatio-temporal resolution, binocular functions, color functions, etc.; ask which functions are correlated and thus share neuronal substrates; and test specific groups, such as participants with Down syndrome. Applied topics include illumination of art in museums and identifying stylistic groupings of archaeological artifacts.
Jennifer Basil
Areas of Expertise: Animal learning and memory, evolution of brain complexity, ecology, evolution, sensory biology, neural basis of behavior, using mostly invertebrate models.
Elizabeth Chua
Areas of Expertise: Elizabeth Chua's main interests are in cognitive, affective, and neural bases of metacognition and memory. The lab mainly focuses on people's knowledge and awareness of their own memory, and how this impacts their behavior. The methods currently used to answer questions on these topics include behavioral, eye tracking, psychophysiological, and brain stimulation techniques.
Matthew Crump
Areas of Expertise: Crump runs the Computational Cognition Lab at Brooklyn College of CUNY. Research interests include learning, memory, attention, performance, and semantic cognition. Some questions include how do people learn new skills like playing an instrument or typing on a keyboard? How does memory work? How do people learn the meaning of words? How do people learn patterns and regularities in their environment? These kinds of questions are investigated using behavioral experiments and computational modeling of cognitive processes. The lab also uses a variety of computational methods and tools to conduct and communicate research. Students interested in cognition, computation, and data-analysis are encouraged to visit the lab website to inquire about research opportunities.
Andrew Delamater
Areas of Expertise: Andrew Delameter's research interests are directed toward an understanding of basic learning processes, particularly as they are revealed in simple Pavlovian and instrumental learning paradigms with laboratory animals. His focus is on understanding, both at the psychological and neural systems levels of analysis, how organisms represent the causal structure of their environment. Some specific projects involve assessing cortico-striato-limbic pathways for their role in reward encoding, with special emphases on reward identity and reward timing processes.
Guillermo Esber
Areas of Expertise: The Esber lab investigates the neural substrates of associative learning at the systems neuroscience level. We focus on associative learning processes because they form the building blocks of causal cognition, and give us a handle to study all sorts of interesting topics, from craving to categorization. Our overarching questions are how neuronal circuits encode information during associative learning and how this information guides behavior. To address these questions, we record and manipulate neural activity in rats while they perform an associative learning task, and later relate the neural activity to our learning variable of interest. To achieve this, we combine large-scale in-vivo single-unit recording and optogenetic stimulation with behavioral designs adapted from the Learning theory tradition. This research is informed by computational learning models that help us bridge neural and behavioral observations. Through this approach we aim to understand the neural underpinnings of associative learning and elucidate their contribution to individual differences and maladaptive behavior.
Paul M. Forlano
Areas of Expertise: Using fish as model systems, Paul Forlano's lab employs a combination of evolutionary/systems neuroscience with a cellular and molecular approach in order to identify neurochemical interactions in circuitry underlying auditory-driven social behavior, mechanisms of steroid-induced neural plasticity, and sex differences in brain and behavior. These studies largely focus on vocal, auditory, and neuroendocrine circuits that are conserved across vertebrates.
Yu Gao
Areas of Expertise: Yu Gao studies biological bases of aggressive, antisocial, psychopathic and criminal behavior. She is interested in identifying neurobiological bases of externalizing behavior in children, adolescents, and adults using psychophysiological method (e.g., electrodermal conditioning, P300). She also studies emotion and decision-making deficits in psychopathic criminals and noncriminals, and basic cognitive-affective processes development in children.
Frank W Grasso
Areas of Expertise: The BioMimetic & Cognitive Robotics Lab is dedicated to discovering mechanisms that control and coordinate behavior. It uses biomimetic robots and computer simulations in parallel with animal behavior studies to validate theories of behavior. Neural, evolutionary and ecological constraints on behavior are central to its work, which holds that a complete understanding of a behavior must include these constraints. The lab takes the computational perspective that models must be simple and powerful.
Natalie A. Kacinik
Areas of Expertise: Psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. One line of research examines the representation and activation of word meanings in semantic memory. The other deals with the comprehension of higher-levels of language (i.e., figurative expressions, discourse and pragmatics). These issues are investigated behaviorally using word recognition and priming procedures, and with methods from cognitive neuroscience like visual half-field presentation, event-related potentials (ERPs), and structural MRI.
Daniel D. Kurylo
Areas of Expertise: Daniel Kurylo's research focuses on ways in which populations of neurons become integrated to produce cognitive functions. Models of neural integration are explored in human clinical populations as well as with animal models. Studies include an analysis of visual impairment in patients with brain injury and schizophrenia. Studies also include an analysis of visual capacities in animals, and changes in perception that result from alterations in neural chemistry.
Laura A. Rabin
Areas of Expertise: Laura Rabin's research investigates cognitive and neurophysiological changes associated with symptomatic prodromal stages of dementia, toward identification of the earliest markers of dementia risk. She also studies changes in judgment and problem solving along the Alzheimer's disease continuum with implications for preventing exploitation, unsafe behaviors, and functional dependence among those most vulnerable. To carry out this work, she utilizes neuropsychological tests, self- and informant-report questionnaires, genetic testing, and neuroimaging (structural and functional MRI). In addition, a line of educational research focuses on understanding factors that impact undergraduate student performance and improving academic and mental health outcomes of diverse students.
Mariana Torrente
Areas of expertise: Neurodegenerative diseases are incurable illnesses that are linked to the death of nerve cells. The Torrente lab studies the changes in gene organization that occur in neurodegenerative disease. Genes spool around proteins called histones, which have tails that contain modifications that regulate access to genetic information. Because these modifications can be targeted with pharmaceuticals, her research opens avenues for new treatments.
Deborah J. Walder
Areas of Expertise: Deborah Walder's research program focuses on the neurodevelopment of mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and depression, with consideration of sex differences. She studies biomarkers of risk (e.g., neurohormones, brain abnormalities, and neuropsychological functioning) and environmental factors, among healthy and high-risk youth and young adults. This includes use of prospective methods to better understand the early trajectory of illness, with an eye toward prevention and early intervention.
