Summer 2023

Faculty

Janeen Hill

Interim Director

Uri Maoz

Assistant 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. 

Sophia Hartenbaum

Research Coordinator

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.

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

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.

Alison Oliver

M.S. Student

Alison studied neuroscience and philosophy at the University of San Diego before coming to the Brain Institute to pursue her research interests, which include social cognition, evolutionary psychology, and neuropsychiatry. She started at the Brain Institute in 2020 and is now teaching and working towards her MSc alongside research with new projects that use EEG, TMS, and pupillometry.

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.

Damini Trehan

PhD Student

Damini is a PhD student at the Brain Institute.

Visiting Researcher

Nathan Faivre

Following medical studies, Nathan obtained a Ph.D. at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and worked as a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

After two years at the Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne in Paris, he is now a CNRS research director at the Laboratoire de Psychologie & Neurocognition in Grenoble.

Between 2019 and 2024, his research was dedicated to metAction, an ERC-funded project which aims to document the contribution of sensorimotor signals to metacognition, and develop new remediation procedures.

He is now focusing on a new ERC-funded project named volta, aiming at identifying electrophysiological and electrochemical correlates of auditory consciousness in awake, asleep, and anesthetized individuals with epilepsy implanted with micro-electrodes.

Postbac Research Assistants

Emma Chen

Emma Chen is a postbac at the Brain Institute. She is involved in the EEG biofeedback, microdosing, and TMS-agency projects. Her research interests lie among the intersection between neuroscience, philosophy, and law.

Amy Whitmarsh

Amy Whitmarsh graduated from Chapman in fall 2022 with major in health sciences major and a neuroscience minor. She has been a research assistant with the Brain Institute since spring 2021. While doing research, Amy has focused on EEG and the use of the float-pod. She plans on becoming a PA, but has yet to decide what specialty. 

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

Sarah Quach

Part-Time Staff/Student Workers

Nico Barrett

Animation Artist/Graphic Designer

Sydney Scott

Administrative Assistant

Alumni

Paulius Rimkevičius (2023~2024, Postdoc)

Sook Mun (Alice) Wong (2017~2024, PhD Student – Postdoc)

Dehua (Andy) Liang (2018~2023, PhD Student – Postdoc), now Data Scientist at Restaurant Depot

Jillian Nooney (2022~2023, Postbac RA)

Debbie Nguyen (2022~2023, Administrative Assistant), now Lab Manager at Tufts University

Jake Gavenas (2018~2023, PhD Student), now Postdoc at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

Liad Mudrik (2022~2023, Visiting Professor), Professor at Tel Aviv University 

Alessandra Buccella (2021~2023, Postdoc), now Assistant Professor (tenure track) at SUNY Albany

Melissa Brillhart (2021~2023, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA), now PhD student at Texas Christian University

Ben Perry (2022~2023, MS Student), now PhD student at Texas Tech University

Martha Shaw (2020~2022, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA)

Angelina Quagletti (2021~2022, Postbac RA), now PhD student at Palo Alto University

Jackson Gregory (2018~2022, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA), now PsyD student at University of Denver

Jinkyoung Oh (2021~2022, Visiting Professor), Professor/Radiologist at Catholic University of Korea

Gilana Pikover (2018~2022, Undergrad RA – Administrative Assistant), now Operations Coordinator at Stealth

Hannah Ravitch (2019~2022, Undergrad RA – Administrative Assistant)

Joanna Pak (2019~2022, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA), now Staff Research Associate at UCSF

Ryan Millares (2021~2022, Undergrad RA), now Software Engineer at DecisionPoint Corporation

Alex Rigl (2020~2021, App Developer), now Director of Product Technology at World Champion Fantasy

Elnaz Lashgari, Ph.D. (2017~2021, PhD student), now Senior Scientist at Abbott

Adrien Schurger-Foy (2020~2021, 2022~2023, 2023~2024, Postbac RA), now MS student at EPFL

Tom Kim (2020~2021, Postbac RA), now PhD student at UCLA

Akima Connelly (2018~2021, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA), now PhD student at Tokyo Institute of Technology

Amber Hopkins (2018~2021, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA), now PhD student at UCLA

Joaquin Valencia (2020~2021, App Developer), now Junior Product Manager at BluIP

Jungsu Pak (2018~2020, MS Student), now Data Scientist at whatsoftdata  

Jyelyn Bold (2018~2020, Undergrad RA – Postbac RA), now Senior Analyst at Hypoithesis Group

Ariane Guirguis (2018~2020, Postbac RA)

Morgan Kindel (2018~2019, Undergrad RA), now PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania

Where we come from