Chantal E. Stern, D. Phil. (e-mail: chantal@bu.edu)
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Boston University

Dr. Stern, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, holds an Associate Professorship at Boston University's Department of Psychology.  She is also on the faculty of the NMR-Center at MGH in Charlestown, MA: MGH-Homepage Click on the following link to access her webpage at Boston University: BU-Homepage.

Postdoctoral Fellows:

Haline Schendan is a post-doctoral fellow who is working with Chantal Stern and Alice Cronin-Golomb. She combines the techniques of fMRI, event-related potentials (ERP), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and neuropsychology to investigate visual cognition and implicit and explicit long-term learning and memory in normal aging and age-related neurological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease and mild Alzheimer's dementia. One of her most recent projects is an fMRI study on implicit and explicit sequence learning in collaboration with Meghan Searl and Rebecca Melrose. For more information, please visit Haline's webpage.

Dr. Atri is a neurologist who joined the lab in the Summer of 2001. He is studying the effects of of scopolamine on paired-associate learning and working memory using fMRI. He collaborates on this project with Seth Sherman. He is also intested in neural network modeling of hippocampal function.

Meghan Searl obtained her Ph.D. in the Clinical Psychology program at B.U. this spring. She will be starting a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in July, 2003.  Her research involves using fMRI and neuropsychological measures to examine frontostriatal functioning and cognition in patients with HIV.  

Graduate Students:

Seth Sherman is a 5th year doctoral student in the Brain, Behavior & Cognition program at B.U. He has worked on several working memory experiments which have examined the interactions between the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex using a two-back task. In collaboration with Dr. Atri, he is currently working on behavioral and fMRI studies that look at the effects of scopolamine on paired-associate learning and memory encoding.

Courtney Horwitz is a 6th-year doctoral student in the Brain, Behavior, & Cognition program at B.U. She is currently designing a study looking for different encoding patterns in healthy adults and those with anxiety-related disorders. For this study, she is collaborating with B.U.'s Center for Anxiety-Related Disorders (Director: David Barlow, Ph.D.).

Karin Schon is a 5th-year doctoral student in the Brain, Behavior & Cognition program at B.U. In collaboration with Sule Tinaz and Dr. David Somers, she is currently finishing up a visual working memory study looking at differential memory delay-period activity during delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) task performance with trial-unique and highly familiar objects and spatial locations.  In collaboration with Dr. Atri, Matt LoPresti, and Marisa Tricarico, and Dr. Mike Hasselmo, she is also currently working on an fMRI study on cholinergic modulation of DMS performance.

Sule Tinaz is a 4th-year doctoral student in the Program in Neuroscience. She is collaborating with Karin Schon on a delayed-matching-to-sample task that specifically is investigating the contributions of stimulus material to brain activity during the memory delay period. She is currently running an fMRI study looking at prospective memory and sequencing in healthy adults and Parkinson patients.

Rebecca Melrose is a 3rd-year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program at B.U. She is intestested in investigating structural and functional changes in HIV dementia.

Mimi (Jessica) Boer, B.A. (e-mail: mboer@bu.edu)

Mimi Boer is a 2nd-year in the Neuropsychology track of the Clinical Psychology doctoral program at B.U.  She is currently using functional MRI and neuropsychological tests to investigate the cognitive and neuronal changes associated with HIV, specifically in the realms of memory encoding and attention.

Maureen Glessner is a 1st-year doctural student in the Brain, Behavior, & Cognition program at B.U. She is currently studying the structural changes that occur in the brain as a result of HIV infection with diffusion tensor MR imaging and cortical thickness software.

Undergraduate Students:

Marissa Tricarico (e-mail marisat@bu.edu)

        Marisa just finished her sophmore year and is working as a UROP-award recipient in Dr. Stern's lab this             summer. She is currently collaborating with Karin Schon, Matt LoPresti, and Alireza Atri on an fMRI             study on cholineric modulation of working memory. She is interested in continuing research in the lab as a         junior and senior and in writing a senior thesis in the future.

Former Lab Members:

Marc Howard, Ph.D. (marc@memory.bu.edu)

Dr. Howard was a post-doctoral fellow in both Prof. Stern's and Prof. Hasselmo's labs. He studies memory from a variety of different perspectives, collaborating with Dr. Atri and Seth Sherman on behavioral and fMRI studies investigating the effect of scopolamine on memory. . For more information on his research please visit his homepage.

Brenda Kirchhoff, Ph.D.. (e-mail: bkirchho@artsci.wustl.edu)

In the spring of 2001, Brenda Kirchhoff graduated with a Ph.D. from the Brain, Behavior & Cognition program at B.U.  She was working in collaboration with Anthony Wagner (M.I.T.) on a study of encoding of verbal and visual stimuli and is has carried out a study of paired associate learning in collaboration with Howard Eichenbaum, and has also worked on a study of the effects of scopolamine on encoding function with Michael Hasselmo. Brenda is currenty a postdoctoral fellow in Randy Buckner's Lab at Washington University in St. Louis.

Robert Thomas was a research associate within the lab. He is a physician in the Sleep Division of the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  He is currently working on a project looking at working memory and attentional performance in sleep deprived individuals.

Kurt Weaver worked in the lab while being a master's student in the psychology department at B.U. He has written a guide for lab members desperate for help on learning how to process fMRI data from start to finish.  Currently, he is a doctoral student in Alex Stevens' lab in the Department of Behavioral Neurosience at Oregon Health Sciences University.

Marlene Nicolas was a research assistant in the lab. She also worked on her senior distinction thesis project which was looking at the effects of scopolamine on encoding function.  A few months after graduation she left left the lab to go home to Florida. Marlene, we miss you!

Irina Ostrovskaya, B.A. (e-mail: irinao@bu.edu)

Irina graduated this spring with a B.A. from B.U.'s University Professor's Program. Currently she is working on her senior distinction project, collaborating with Courtney Horwitz and the Center for Anxiety Related Disorders on a study of memory and anxiety in specific phobia.

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The lab is grateful for support from several sources, including the National Insitute of Health and Clara Mayo Awards from the Boston University Dept. of Psychology (M. Searl., Courtney Horwitz, and Karin Schon), as well as UROP awards from the Undergraduate Research Oppotunities Program at Boston University (Marlene Nicolas, Mimi Boer, and Irina Ostrovskaya).