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Lab members
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| Vanessa Vogel-Farley (contact
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I received my bachelors degree in Biology with a minor in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2004. I joined Dr. Nelson's lab during my last year of undergraduate studies after completing a directed research project at the Center for Neurobehavioral Development. This experience got me interested in the processes associated with brain development during the neonatal period into adolescence and that factors that can affect normal development. In the Nelson lab I worked as a principal/senior lab technician on several of the "Neural Mechanisms of Early Memory Development" studies which examine the development of face and object processing during the first year of life. Currently, I am the Clinical Research Coordinator for the Developmental Medicine Center Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, where I have the enormous opportunity to work on Dr. Nelson's collaborations with scientists from MIT and Harvard examining several clinical populations, including autism. I am also heading up the creation of a participant recruitment database for the Boston area, which includes infants and children of all ages and backgrounds to facilitate the contacting of families interested in participating in research.
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| Alissa Westerlund (contact Alissa Westerlund) |
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I received my bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of North Dakota in 1997 and have had the pleasure of working as Dr. Nelson's Lab Coordinator since 1999. I oversee Dr. Nelson's large research program on the typical development of face processing, and since moving to the Boston area in 2005 we have continued our exciting work on projects with research groups around the world. My graduate work in child public health and toxicology has been complementary to several projects, including the work in Chile that is examining the long-term outcomes of iron deficiency, a project conducted in the Inuit community in northern Quebec examining the long-term effects of exposure to environmental contaminants, as well as the research being done in Romania that is examining the efficacy of foster care as a means of remediating early deprivation suffered during early institutionalization.
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| Jenny Richmond Ph.D. (contact Jenny Richmond, Ph.D.) |
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I am a post doc in the lab and joined the Nelson lab a year ago after graduating with my PhD in Psychology from the University of Otago in New Zealand. My research investigates how brain development contributes to memory development during infancy. Much of my thesis work focused on visual paired-comparison (VPC) performance in adults and the interpretation of novelty and null preferences. I am excited to continue this work on the McDonnell project, using ERPs and eye tracking to look at the neural basis of visual preferences in infants. In addition, I am interested in the neural basis of age-related changes in memory flexibility and the role that context plays in infants memory retrieval.
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| Margaret Moulson, Ph.D. (contact Margaret Moulson, Ph.D.) |
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I had the privilege of spending four years in the Nelson lab as a graduate student, and received my PhD from the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota in August, 2007. I am currently a postdoctoral associate in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and continue to collaborate with Dr. Nelson and other lab members on a variety of projects. I am primarily interested in the development of social perception in infancy; much of my research focuses on the development of face perception and the role that early experiences play in shaping face processing skills over the course of development. I use both behavioral and electrophysiological (e.g., ERP) methods to investigate questions in this area.
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| Joseph McCleery, Ph.D. (contact Joe McCleery, Ph.D.) |
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I received a B.A. in Psychology from Rutgers University, Camden, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. My primary research interest is to elucidate the neural and behavioral mechanisms that underlie both typical and atypical social-emotional and social-communicative development. Much of my research has focused on young children who have been diagnosed with autism, as well as infants who are at high risk for developing autism. One of the long-term goals of this research is to use the information gathered from a neuroscience perspective to develop interventions for infants and children who are at risk for social-emotional and social-communicative difficulties. I joined Dr. Nelson's laboratory in June of 2007, with support from the Cure Autism Now Foundation to conduct research on the relationship between atypical face processing and social-emotional functioning in young children with autism.
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| Ben Balas, Ph.D (contact Ben Balas, Ph.D.) |
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I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Nelson Lab, having received both an S.B.
degree (2002) and a Ph. D. (2007) from MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. I am generally interested in high-level recognition skills in adults and infants, with an emphasis on face recognition. My work to date has been focused on integrating computer vision models with visual psychophysics, a strategy I hope to keep pursuing while studying the development of face and object expertise with Dr. Nelson. In particular, I am interested in contributing to our understanding of the nature of "perceptual narrowing" over the course of visual development.
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| Kristin Shutts, Ph.D. (contact Kristin Shutts, Ph.D.) |
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I joined the Nelson lab as a post-doctoral fellow in September 2006 after receiving my Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Harvard University in 2006. My main line of research concerns the development of social cognition, in particular how infants and children come to think of themselves and others members of different social categories ( e.g., gender, race, age), and how this changes over the course of development. To study these questions, I use a combination of behavioral, psychophysiological (e.g., heart rate), and neuroscience (e.g., ERP) methods.
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| Anne Rifkin, Ph.D. (contact Anne Rifkin, Ph.D.) |
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I received a B.A. in psychology from Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. I am primarily interested in the impact of non-optimal-but not necessarily extreme-experience on the brain. In my dissertation I examined the impact of subtle differences in early relationships with parents on subtle changes in stress hormones (i.e., cortisol) and cognitive functions known to be impacted by stress (e.g., memory and executive functioning). As a post-doc in the Nelson laboratory, and in collaboration with researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, I have broadened my research interests to also consider the effects of other individual differences and corresponding fluctuations in hormones on these same cognitive functions. Using ERP and behavioral techniques, I am currently investigating the role of leptin, a hormone that varies by body fat and nutrition, on memory and executive function.
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| Adrienne Tierney; M.Sc, Ed.M. (Contact Adrienne Tierney; M.Sc, Ed.M.) |
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I am currently a doctoral student in Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I received my B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior from Wesleyan University, my M.Sc. in Neuroscience from Université Paris VI, and my Ed.M. in Mind, Brain and Education from Harvard's School of Education. My research interests are in the relationship among biological, cognitive, and social development particularly as they relate to development in children with autism. For my dissertation, I will be working with Dr. Nelson on understanding how genetic, neural, and cognitive information together help explain aspects development in autism.
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| Michelle Bosquet, Ph.D. (Contact Michelle Bosquet, Ph.D.) |
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I received a B.A. in psychology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in developmental and clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota. I have completed a fellowship in infant mental health and postdoctoral training in the assessment and treatment of traumatic stress responses. I am primarily interested in understanding the ways in which children become vulnerable to developing mental health problems early in development. One specific area where I have focused is the study of the impact of maternal anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder on infant emotional and biological development. I am currently investigating associations between mothers' traumatic life experiences and mothers' and infants' abilities to regulate their emotions and their physiological responses to stress. For example, in collaboration with Dr. Nelson and other lab members, I am examining how infants of mothers with significant trauma histories may process emotions differently at the neural level than infants of mothers without a significant trauma history. I hope that the information from these studies will help us prevent the development of mental health problems in children.
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| Maria Fusaro (contact Maria Fusaro) |
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I am a doctoral student at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and joined the lab to learn more about brain-based approaches to the study of cognitive development. I received a B.A. in Education (Human Development) from Brown University, and an M.A. in Mind, Brain, and Education from Harvard's Education School. My research interests are in the development of social-cognitive skills, from infancy through the preschool years.
Using behavioral and electrophysiological techniques, I am examining how non-verbal cues of agreement and disagreement (e.g., head nodding and
shaking) shape the way children process information. Four-year-olds are eligible to participate in this study of the neural correlates of non-verbal cue processing.
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| Rebecca Hansen (contact Rebecca Hansen) |
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I joined the Nelson lab as Recruitment Coordinator in June of 2007. Prior to that time, I worked in a variety of fields, including running a preschool after school program, promoting youth programs at a Boston public relations firm, and teaching college-level writing while pursuing my MFA at Emerson College. All of those experiences have been shaped by my interest in how children and adolescents learn, whether at the preschool or college level. Through my work here in the lab, I have been able to continue to pursue that interest in new and exciting ways. As Recruitment Coordinator, I have the opportunity to raise awareness of the lab's work within the Greater Boston community. I truly enjoy talking with people about how we are working to improve our understanding of infant and child development. Please feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions, or if you are interested in signing up for our Participant Recruitment Database, through which families with infants and children have the option to be contacted about ongoing research opportunities.
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| Katherine Hung (contact Katherine Hung) |
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I received my bachelor's degree in Brain and Cognitive Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and am currently working as a research study assistant in Dr. Nelson's lab. My research will be focused on studying the role of early experience in face processing. More specifically, we will be examining the course of perceptual narrowing in infants and the effects of training and experience on development. Furthermore, we are interested in determining the breadth of the perceptual window by examining discrimination of various categories of faces such as species, gender, and age.
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| Tanu Luke (Contact Tanu Luke) |
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I received my bachelor's degree with a double major in Physics and History and with a minor in Mathematics from Saint Mary's College / University of Notre Dame in 2006. Currently at the Nelson Lab, I am heading the Near Infrared Spectroscopy Imaging project under the McDonnell grant, in addition to projects dealing with Source Localization studies.
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