Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Cognitive science of religion and spirituality

Kinesiology

Research Interests:

My perspective of physio is that prevention is better than cure. My aim is to target the pediatric population and incorporate a healthy lifestyle and raise the awareness of physical fitness from a very young age such that they become better and stronger individuals. I am especially interested in studying the development & growth of individuals with neuro-developmental disabilities such as Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Down syndrome, etc. and how we as PT's can be helpful to them in order to improve.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

I am interested in the molecular mechanisms that govern synaptic connectivity and their downstream behavioral contributions. To study this I am using a combination quantitative neuroanatomy, gene expression analysis and electrophysiology to examine the molecular machinery governing complex behavioral responses mediated by orexin neurons the mammalian lateral hypothalamic area.

Pharmaceutical Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in investigating epigenetic mechanisms involved in substance use disorders, and the development of epigenetic pharmacotherapies.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

My research is focused on the application of mesoscopic calcium imaging as a way to characterize patterns of neural activity and the way that antiepileptic drugs can alter epileptic activity across different strains of mice.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Broadly, I am interested in the pragmatic language abilities of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with a particular emphasis on their narrative abilities. I investigate how certain linguistic devices (i.e., discourse markers, pronouns, general all-purpose verbs) play a role in children with ASD’s construction of narratives. Additionally, I am interested in the role of the language sampling context and its associated social, cognitive, and linguistic demands.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in modeling the process of rhythm entrainment (i.e. individuals syncing up to a musical beat) using nonlinear oscillation dynamics. I am further interested in looking at meaningful differences in rhythm perception between those with ASD and those who are neurotypical, and using that information to refine music therapy applications.

Linguistics

Research Interests:

Morphology, Morphonology, Morphosyntax, Experimental morphonology and phonology, Fieldwork.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests lie in the behavioral outcomes (anxiety, depression, cognitive impairments, etc.) of various transgenic mouse models. My goal is to help advance the understanding of phenotypic characteristics in new developments of murine genetic engineering.

Nursing

Research Interests:

My long-term research plan is to develop a comprehensive understanding of bio-behavioral and multi-omics mechanism of pain and develop and tailor precision interventions to predict, prevent, and treat pain among older adults with cardiovascular disease

Literatures, Cultures & Langauges

Research Interests:

My research interests are broadly at the intersection of bilingualism and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language pedagogy. I work on speech perception and specifically the interplay of bottom-up acoustic cues and top-down contextual cues on both native and non-native speech. I am also passionate in applying experimental findings to develop real-world pedagogical innovations.

Communication

Research Interests:

My research generally looks into the social-psychological and cognitive underpinnings in the use of new digital technologies for communication, information seeking and consumer behaviors. Specifically, I'm interested in using interdisciplinary methods from social-psychology, neuro and cognitive science to tap into people's inner drives and mechanisms for social media and internet activities engagement. Also, I'm interested in computational techniques for dynamic network analysis.

Psychological Sciences - PAC-E

Research Interests:

My primary research interests are in collective intelligence and social dynamics. Focusing on social systems of invertebrates, I hope to bridge the gap between insect and human behavior using dynamical systems modeling. I am particularly involved in the study of emergent hive behaviors that result from micro-level individualistic laws.

Engineering

Research Interests:

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

My research focuses on characterization of stem cell niches in the developing brain. Specifically, I am examining fate decisions of stem cells that promote neurogenesis, ependymogenesis or regeneration, in the case of injury or disease. I am particularly interested in how hydrocephalus affects brain development.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I explore heart-rate variability as a measure of whole-body health, including its bi-directional role in managing what have traditionally been thought of as separate "top-down" and "bottom-up" processing systems (c.f., Thayer and Lane, 2000; Park and Thayer, 2014). Delineating how the mutilfractal structure of HRV entails adaptive responses to contexts may prove invaluable for advancing our understanding of resilience, adaptivity, and whole-body health (Goldberger et al. 2002).

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in better understanding the processes underlying autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Can individual differences in these processes help us determine goals of intervention, predict later outcome, or form more homogenous subgroups within ASD?

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I'm interested in understanding the neural underpinnings of deficits in different domains of cognition in clinical disorders. Specifically, I want to research how sensory perception is integrated by our mind and how that perception can be altered by interference from external and internal stimuli. I am hopeful that this research can lead to the identification of biomarkers that can help better identify disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in the types of information that people use to understand the sounds of speech, and whether different people rely on different sources of information. I use behavioral, computational and neural methods to study these questions.

Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences

Research Interests:

I’m fascinated by speech perception –the way we extract discrete, meaningful units from a messy, transient, and variable acoustic signal. I’m particularly interested in the mechanisms by which we adapt in perception and production of speech to account for variability; my current research examines causal inference herein.

Molecular & Cell Biology

Research Interests:

Presently, I am interested in studying the function of 3 imprinted genes on the mouse X chromosome. These genes are known to be imprinted in the brain and highly expressed in reproductive tissues. I am interested in further understanding their roles in neurodevelopment, behavior, and reproduction.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Interpersonal Coordination and Synchrony, Developmental Social Motor Behavior, Dynamical System Theories, Development of Coordinated Movements, Time Series Analysis, Embodied Cognition, Self-Organization

Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences

Research Interests:

My research focuses on the speech perception abilities of individuals with receptive and expressive language disorders, especially Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Specifically, I am interested in how different listening environments facilitate speech perception and consequent language learning in individuals with language disorders.

Behavioral Neuroscience

Research Interests:

Depression, Parkinson's disease, stress, motivational dysfunction, dopaminergic pathways, pharmacology.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Semantic and episodic memory integration during sentence processing, Event processing and representation, Neural correlates of event processing and semantic/episodic memory integration.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

Central noradrenergic neurons are transiently activated when animals react to behaviorally-relevant stimuli. I'm currently trying to understand how norepinephrine release influences the integration of external stimuli into adaptive behavioral responses. To this end, I use in vivo calcium imaging and optogenetics to monitor and control specific circuits in behaving mice. My research may provide some insight into the basis of motivational deficits.

Human Development & Family Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in young children's experiences in early childhood education and childcare settings, and the role that interactions between parents and early childcare providers can play in young children's lives. Furthermore, I am interested in how these adults in children's lives during their early childhood years can impact social emotional development in ways that benefit the development of skills that will help children in academics, relationships, and mental health later in life.

Website

Statistics

Research Interests:

Implement Bayesian strategies for variable (or feature) selection when the covariates (and parameters) of interest have both spatial and temporal structures. Fit local Bayesian models using different prior distributions in the presence of high dimensionality in the covariate structure. Conducting binary classification using proposed threshold methods based on the selected prior. Model selection comparing the choice of prior in variable selection performance.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in perceiving-acting systems, the thermodynamics underlying those systems, and how it is that such systems adapt to changes in the context of constraints during goal directed activities. Further, I worry about fundamentals, such as intentionality, normativity, and the emergence of goals, as well as philosophy of science.

Expertise: R/RStudio; Markdown/LaTeX; Matlab; ggplot/plotly; multilevel/growth curve modeling; detrended fluctuation analysis; psychopy

Human Development and Family Sciences 

Research Interests:

My research interests revolve around the health and well-being of individuals with chronic illness and their loved ones. I am specifically interested in how stress, adjustment, and coping influence psychosocial and physical outcomes in this population.

Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences

Research Interests:

My primary research interests are in speech perception, including the processes which guide our mapping from acoustics to meaning, how we adapt to variation in the speech signal, and individual differences in this adaptation. In addition, I am interested in prosody and learning.

Statistics

Research Interests:

Spatial Statistics - Data Visualization - Statistical Computing

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research explores social dynamics, interpersonal coordination, and group synchronization. I'm interested in how environmental and social contexts modulate behavior and health outcomes. Through my work I aim to bridge our understanding of individuals and collective structures, with a specific focus on intergroup relations and systems of oppression.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am chiefly interested in the cognitive systems that shape human decision-making, especially in the contexts of health care and public health. The goal of my research is to incorporate theories of psychology and cognitive science to investigate the role of attention, perception, motivation, and intelligence (human & machine) in behavioral processes across multiple disciplines.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

I am interested in how disease impacts early brain development. My current work addresses how maternal illness affects a stem cell niche in the brain of developing embryos, and how this modulates the neural stem cell functions of neurogenesis and ependymogenesis along the lateral ventricle surface. I am mainly focused on how the ependymogenesis-neurogenesis relationship changes in cases of post infectious fetal-onset hydrocephalus.

Human Development and Family Sciences

Research Interests:

Philosophy

Research Interests:

My main interests are in formal semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, and logic. In particular, I am interested in how natural language represents agency, action, and normativity. A natural consequence of these interests mean more broadly I am interested in modality, aspect and tense.

Website

Physiology and Neurobiology

Research Interests:

I am interested in understanding how disordered breathing can affect key neurological processes. My current research focuses on examining the functional role of CO2/H+ activated hypothalamic neurons and its relationship to brainstem respiratory centers to control and regulate breathing.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Nathan Lautz studies the neurocognitive basis of concepts. He’s interested in how conceptual knowledge comes to be grounded through experience in the world, with at least some aspects of meaning consequently stored in corresponding sensorimotor and affective systems in the brain. His research addresses how this grounding affects the format and content of mental representation.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I study language development in people on the autism spectrum. My current work focuses on verb production in autistic children. More generally, I'm interested in studying the language and communication abilities of low/minimally verbal and non-speaking autistic individuals, with the ultimate goal of contributing to our understanding of why some people do not learn to produce language.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in how the brain makes sense of events that it experiences through language. I am primarily interested in what our brains do that allows us to mentally represent participants and actions in these events, and how that may differ from events that we experience first-hand. I address these questions using a combination of behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational techniques.

Website

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests include neural mechanisms of reading development and the neural signatures of successful reading instruction/learning intervention outcomes. I want to bridge the gap between educational practice and cognitive neuroscience and hopes it will eventually benefit individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Website

English

Research Interests:

My research focuses on the intersections of cognition and literature. Specifically, I focus on empathy, theory of mind, and embodied experiences in multiple genres and forms. I focus on questions like "What about the graphic novel prompts experiences of empathy or practices of theory of mind differently than prose?" and "How and why can some readers embody the experience of characters while reading?" My work uses a combination of literary theory, cognitive science and psychology, and aesthetics.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

We know that at any point in development social connectedness between parent and child is very important to child cognitive growth. Yet at any point throughout development there is variability in how parent and child coordinate their attention. I am interested in how parent visual and manual attention directs child behavior at the moment-to-moment scale, supporting processes such as attention, exploration, and language acquisition.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests focus on the interaction of phenomena traditionally categorized as perception, cognition, and action.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests are focused on early brain injuries that occur in preterm infants, outcomes after injury and potential treatments. my studies mainly focus in modeling injuries in rodents to test the effects of potential treatments on cognitive outcomes. I also work with medical record data to further understand what factors, such as inflammation and prenatal conditions, effect developmental outcomes.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests are concerned with the intersection of language and analogical reasoning, and the implications for education. I am especially interested in how psycholinguistic properties of words may factor into verbal analogical reasoning mechanisms, and how this may manifest behaviorally and neutrally.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

I am interested in studying the effectiveness of low carbohydrate diets at ameliorating symptoms of post-traumatic brain injury such as learning deficits and aggression in chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) models. By supplementing high-carbohydrate diets with the ketogenic metabolite beta-hydroxybutyrate my research is aimed at working to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie ketone body supplementation that make it an effective treatment for neuropathological conditions.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research uses cognitive neuroscience methods to unveil the neural processes behind how we learn, a process which is relevant to almost every research field (as research is the business of learning), but with most obvious connections to psycholinguistics, clinical psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and developmental psychology. I plan on using not only my research findings, but also my extensive outreach experience to be a catalyst for interdisciplinary research both within and outside of the IBaCS community.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

I am interested in the neuroanatomical basis of learning and memory, and specifically how synaptic circuits are reorganized when emotional memories are formed. I aim to study the fine functional anatomy of canonical and non-canonical sensory inputs to the lateral amygdala and their involvement in auditory fear learning using rodent models.

Mathematics

Research Interests:

Using neuroimaging techniques and fMRI methods, I am interested in studying mathematical problem-solving from a neurocognitive perspective. I am primarily interested in developing expert models of brain activation of problem-solving as well as developing ways to translate this research into effective pedagogical practices.

Philosophy

Research Interests:

Physiology and Neurobiology

Research Interests:

I am interested in the spine apparatus and studying morphological alterations to this structure in response to Pavlovian fear learning. To accomplish this, I use light-level and electron microscopy.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Reading is a complex cognitive task and children show wide variability in reading performance despite access to instruction. Atypicalities at the neural and genetic levels are thought to contribute to reading difficulties. I study relationships among reading/language skills, brain structure, and genetics in an effort to better understand reading development.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests include examining the neural basis of cognitive deficits in Schizophrenia and the impact of cognitive deficits on quality of life. Specifically, I am interested in how neurological impairments are related to deficits in social functioning. Additional research interests include the impact of cognitive deficits on Dement

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in language emergence and development, particularly with regard to homesigners (deaf individuals who do not have access to signed or spoken language input and innovate gesture systems to communicate with the hearing people around them). I am also interested in how language exposure can affect math knowledge and performance.

Physiology & Neurobiology

Research Interests:

We are interested in understanding circuit representations of fear learning and safety, specifically synaptic reorganization as a result of the formation of emotional memories. Anxiety is known to fluctuate over the female reproductive cycle, and our long-term goal is to understand the effects of the natural hormone cyclicity on anxiety circuitry in the female rat brain.

Website

Neuroscience/Center on Aging

Research Interests:

My current research investigates the impact of central nervous system demyelination on urinary physiology in the context of Multiple Sclerosis. We use animal models of MS to study how MS lesions that develop in the brain-bladder neuroaxis interrupt the neural pathways of micturition to manifest MS-associated bladder dysfunction. Previously, I was involved in research elucidating epigenetic marks associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Philosophy

Research Interests:

I am interested in the cognitive role and epistemic value of different forms of natural language. A particular interest of mine is story form including how formal/computational systems can interpret it. This connects to my broader interest in how AI can serve or harm us epistemically.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Why do some people want to dominate others? Why do some oppose intergroup equality while others support it? Most importantly, how can we promote social tolerance and justice? I want to answer these questions by integrating social psychology, political science, and neuroscience. I aim to ground my research in intergroup relations theory and sociopolitical history to ensure that it benefits systemically marginalized communities.

Institute of Material Science

Research Interests:

Brain machine interfaces, Brain computer interfaces, Micro-electrodes and nano-materials related to the development of efficient micro-electrodes.

Philosophy

Research Interests:

I am primarily interested in the unity of consciousness and how the neuroscience of information-integration can inform philosophical theories on the unity of consciousness. Relatedly I am interested in the issue of "interpretation."

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in how the brain forms and sends predictions during language processing and the effects they might have on functions like speech comprehension and error detection. Moreover, I want to study how the ability to predict and the effects of prediction on language processing might vary across individuals, both across healthy individuals as well as in those with acquired language disorders.

Kinesiology

Research Interests:

Infant and child development, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, Down Syndrome, Pediatric Physiotherapy, Pediatric rehabilitation, Novel movement-based interventions for children with developmental disabilities, Assistive technologies and aids to empower children with disabilities

Educational Psychology

Research Interests:

I am interested in researching how and to what extent knowledge from the interdisciplinary field of Mind, Brain and Education science (MBE) impacts novice or pre-service teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and actions. This could lead to further research into specific MBE teacher education opportunities and subsequent changes in teacher efficacy and/or learner outcomes

Psychological Sciences 

Research Interests:

My research to date has focused on the cognitive processes underlying both substance and behavioral addictions. I have designed multiple Approach-Avoidance Tasks to examine automatic approach biases for different addictive stimuli, which contribute to the maintenance of addictive behaviors. I am interested in developing cognitive bias modification interventions to restructure maladaptive cognitive processes, and in turn, reduce real-life, problematic behaviors.

Biomedical Engineering

Research Interests:

We are working with Firefighter technology that will help firefighter in the following areas: pairing - allows firefighters to better stay connected; targeting - enables firefighters to better find a target location; evacuation - enables firefighter to better find the route out to safety.

Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences

Research Interests:

I am a certified Speech Language Pathologist and a doctoral student with a passion for improving the treatment outcomes in individuals with aphasia. I believe we can achieve this by identifying ecologically valid measures to assess language recovery and discovering objective biomarkers to personalize treatment for individuals with aphasia.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Broadly speaking, my interest lies in how individuals with autism spectrum disorders learn and use language, with particular emphasis on lexical acquisition and organization. I am interested in the central auditory system’s role in language processing, specifically how inconsistent neural coding of complex speech sounds affects word learning and use.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests focus on meaningful interactions, the consequences of conflict in conversations and how to mitigate them with interpersonal synchronous interventions, and also reframing how we understand prospective memory from an ecological dynamic perspective.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Learning through the observation of others is an essential skill to surviving and thriving in one’s environment. I am interested in the neuronal mechanisms underlying this form of social learning in animals. What brain areas mediate this form of learning? How might these areas differ in people with social learning deficits?

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

While opioids are the gold standard prescription analgesics for chronic pain, they are highly addictive and the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. My work investigates the therapeutic efficacy of minor phytocannabinoids and terpenes in mouse models of chronic pain, anxiety, and depression while screening these compounds for dependence potential and abuse liability. My goal is to identify less-addictive pharmacotherapies for pain and related mental health disorders.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

Reading is a complex cognitive function for which the brain is not congenitally wired, yet reading disabilities have a probable genetic causation. I am interested in using cutting edge techniques to integrate multimodal neuroimaging data to better study the relationship between genetics and reading (dis)abilities as mediated by the brain.

Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences

Research Interests:

My research focuses on how cognitive processes interface with language production as well as how these processes are affected in the event of trauma. The research also seeks to determine how the affected cognitive processes, such as attention, working memory, information processing, etc., may interfere with language rehabilitation.

Statistics

Research Interests:

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I work on the mapping between morphosyntax and the mental representation of events in which objects change state. I am interested in how grammatical categories (e.g., tense, aspect, participles, etc.) activate the content of event representations during sentence comprehension, and how this content changes depending on the syntactic environment.

Genetics & Genome Sciences, UConn Health

Research Interests:

My research is focused on understanding how gene regulatory sequences control target genes over great genomic distances. Using chromosome conformation capture tools and high-throughput sequencing I am identifying long-range, three-dimensional interactions between tissue-specific regulatory elements and their target genes. I have identified long-range interactions between a putative superenhancer region and the HoxA gene cluster in mouse embryonic craniofacial tissue, heart, brain and limb.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests at UConn are in behavioral neuroscience, specifically observational learning in rat models. I'm interested in the possible patterns and factors that influence optimal learning in a given observational learning task such as rats learning best from the same species of rat or a different species.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

At the intersection of cognitive science and health psychology, my research primarily focused on how executive functioning influences diet, binge eating, and outcomes in weight loss treatment.

Statistics

Research Interests:

Network analysis, national economic accounting, input-output analysis, applied econometrics, macroeconomic statistical analysis.

Educational Psychology

Research Interests:

I am currently a first-year doctoral student and works as a graduate assistant in the Giftedness, Creativity, and Talent Development program. My research interest lies in creative thinking development in the classroom, gifted women and creativity in cross-cultural settings.

Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

I am interested in studying neurobiology and treatment of mental disorders characterized by deficits in self-regulation (inhibition, emotion regulation, and impulse control). I use interdisciplinary methods to examine the structure, function, and connectivity changes that underline cognitive deficits.

 
Psychological Sciences

Research Interests:

My primary research focuses on the relationship between action and perception in facilitating the development of cognitive control abilities associated with goal directed behavior and problem solving. The physiological development of the brain is not the only driver of the development of executive function. It stems from the dynamic reciprocal interactions between our brains, our experiences, and our environment.

 
Statistics

Research Interests:

I am interested developing new techniques in statistics for dealing with incomplete data in different contexts.

 
Biomedical Engineering

Research Interests:

I study the mechanisms and novel ways of electrical neurostimulation for treatment of neuropsychiatric diseases from a computational perspective. Specifically, I am working on the cerebellar involvement in parkinson's disease and essential tremor, and how deep brain stimulation could improve such conditions. I am also interested in ultrasonic neurostimulation as an alternative approach to modulate neural activities.

 Human Development & Family Sciences

Research Interests:

My research interests are on parent-child relationships, acculturative stress, and identity development in immigrant families, especially Asian immigrant families. My research projects have included how parent involvement influences Asian adolescents’ academic performance; the relation between parental behavior and adolescents’ ethnic identity development; and how acculturative stress and parent-child acculturation gaps affect the behavioral and cognitive development of Asian children.

 Nursing

Research Interests:

My research interest focus on mitochondrial function/dysfunction bridges the impact of early life pain/stress on neurodevelopmental deficits in the preterm infant. I hypothesize that mitochondrial function/dysfunction plays a critical role at the interface between stress/pain and neurodevelopmental outcomes in infants' early and later life.