Summer 2023

Faculty

Janeen Hill

Interim Director

Uri Maoz

Associate Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychology

Aaron Schurger

Assistant Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychology

Staff

Tian Lan

Senior Research Engineer;
Operations Lead

Tian oversees all equipment, facilities and experiments in the labs. He also manages the grants as well as the day-to-day operations of the institute. 

Cole Van Diggelen

Administrative Assistant

Cole graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with his Master of Business Administration degree in May of 2023. With an interest in organizational behavior and administration, he centers on work within the realm of higher education. Beginning at Chapman in September of 2023, Cole focuses on maintaining an organized and structured environment for the Brain Institute, and all of its people

Postdocs

Tomáš Dominik

Dr. Dominik received his Ph.D. in December 2019 after defending a dissertation thesis pertaining various aspects of Libet’s experiment. His interests lie in the overlap between psychology, psychophysiology and neuroscience of volition. Specifically, he studies the reliability of introspective reports of motor intention or the origins of brain potentials preceding voluntary or pre-contemplated movements. He also previously led a project of complex replication of Libet’s experiment. He uses EEG, various psychophysiological methods (ECG, EDA, EMG, EOG, etc.), and behavioral methods for his research.

Ugo Bruzadin Nunes

Ugo is a postdoc at the Brain Institute. He earned his PhD in Psychology at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, where he specialized in cognitive neuroscience. His doctoral dissertation focused on the short and long-term effects of nicotine, bupropion, and abstinence on task-related brain activity. He is currently working on a project called Triangulating Neurocorrelates of Consciousness, where he will be using machine learning to identify brain signals common conscious awareness, using EEG data from three different tasks and three different laboratories. His research interests include consciousness, attention, memory, the effects and treatment implications of different drugs on cognition, and the use of machine learning and neural networks to decode brain signals.

Graduate Students

Dimitri Bredikhin

PhD Student

Dimitri is a PhD student at the Brain Institute. He holds an MSc degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and a BSc degree in Biology, majoring in Animal Physiology. Currently specializing in the neuronal correlates of movement initiation, he investigates its intricate relationship with the philosophical concept of free will. In his research, Dimitri extensively utilizes EEG/MEG techniques to explore these cognitive phenomena.

Caitlyn Chavez

PhD Candidate

Caitlyn is a PhD student at the Brain Institute and MLAT lab in Chapman University’s Computational and Data Sciences program. She graduated from UCSB in June 2016 with a B.S. in Chemistry. In her research, Caitlyn focuses on deep learning, computer vision, and signal processing in solving problems in precision medicine and biomedical imaging.

Lucas Jeay-Bizot

PhD Candidate

Lucas Jeay-Bizot is a PhD student in the Computational and Data Science program at Chapman University. Lucas received an MA in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Glasgow and will be graduating with an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Vienna. His research interests cover both the neuroscientific and philosophical investigations of the phenomenon of free will. His research projects aim to investigate different aspects of voluntary actions using EEG and machine learning techniques.

Alejandro de Miguel

PhD Student

Alejandro de Miguel is a PhD student in Computational and Data Sciences at Chapman University. He earned his MS in Artificial Intelligence from Munster Technological University in Ireland and worked in industry for five years as a Data Science Manager at Just Eat Takeaway. His current research is focused on using high-frame rate video recordings of human decision-making to predict motion and action through computer vision techniques.

Guillaume Pech

PhD Candidate (joint with Axel Cleeremans)

I graduated from the master in cognitive sciences at the University of Lyon Lumière 2 (France) in 2021. Then, I had the opportunity to work as a research assistant during 8 months at the Université Libre de Bruxelles with Prof. Emilie CASPAR (M&SB lab). We conducted projects investigating several processes related to decision-making, such as the sense of agency, empathy for pain and cognitive conflict using EEG. We approached rare populations such as inmates, military, and former perpetrators and survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. In 2022, I had the honor to receive a 6-month predoctoral fellowship offered by the Neurophilosophy of Free Will for the project ‘Does the Readiness Potential reflect action initiation or uncertainty?’.

I am now a PhD student under the supervision of Pr. Axel CLEEREMANS (CO3) and Pr. Uri MAOZ (Brain Institute). My research focuses on the neural markers of volition, with a specific interest in the Readiness Potential. In a broader sense, my topic of interest is to investigate how to model decision-making and how these findings can feed the debate on free-will.

Cristina Poliziani

PhD Student

Cristina Poliziani is a D.Sc student in the Mathematics, Philosophy, and Physics program at Chapman University. Cristina graduated with an MSc in Cognitive Sciences and Decisional Processes, curriculum Applied Cognitive Neuroscience, from the University of Milan. Her research interests are both philosophical and neuroscientific and her research projects aim to investigate differences between arbitrary and deliberate decisions and neuroethical implication of AI implementation, using EEG and machine learning techniques.

Postbac Research Assistants

Sophia Hartenbaum

Sophia graduated from Santa Clara University with a B.S. in Psychology. She began her position at the Brain Institute in June 2023 and is currently involved in a few research projects examining intention, agency, and voluntary actions. She plans to pursue a PhD in neuroscience and psychology.

JoJo Widi

JoJo graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Pomona College in 2023. He is involved with a variety of different projects related to the study of consciousness at the Brain Institute, with a particular focus on attention schema theory.

Undergraduate Research Assistants

Bahar Babagoli

Raniyah Chishti

Part-Time Staff

Nico Barrett

Animation Artist/Graphic Designer

Alumni

Where we come from