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Director
Kevin
Ochsner, Ph.D. [google
scholar profile] Email
Kevin received his bachelor's
degree summa cum laude in psychology from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and his Masters degree and Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. He has
also received postdoctoral training in social psychology at Harvard and
functional neuroimaging at Stanford
University.
He currently is
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of
Psychology at Columbia
University. Kevin's
research interests include the psychological and neural processes involved
in emotion, self-control, and person perception. All of his work employs a
social cognitive neuroscience approach that seeks to integrate the theories
and methods of social psychology on the one hand, and cognitive
neuroscience on the other.
Kevin is a recipient
of the Young Investigator
Award from The Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Columbia
University’s Lenfest
Distinguished Faculty Award, and the APA
Division 3 New Investigator Award. In 2010 Kevin was identified as
27th most cited Social Psychologist of all time, corrected for
stage of career, in an article on citation impact by Nosek et al.
published in PSPB. In 2008 Kevin was identified as the most
cited Assistant Professor in Social Psychology in an article published in
SPSP’s Diologue.
Along with Sarah
Wolley, Kevin is Co-Director of the Psychology Undergraduate Honor’s
Program. His teaching includes
seminars on social
cognitive neuroscience as well as a lecture course on experimental
psychological methods
for studying emotion and social cognition.
Interview
with Pearson publishers about the origins of Dr. Ochsner’s interest
in Psychology and the work in the SCN Lab. Recorded at APS 2007. (Scroll to
right for interview).
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Laura
Martin
Laura is interested in the influence of
emotion regulation on behavior. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in
2011. Her dissertation work with Mauricio Delgado examined the effect of
emotion regulation on financial risk-taking and neural reward processing.
Her current research involves exploring the neural mechanism of implicit
emotion regulation and comparing explicit and implicit regulation. Prior to
her graduate training, Laura worked with Jin Fan at Mount
Sinai.
Dario
Bombari
Dario received his Ph.D. from the University of Bern in 2010. His research interests
range from face perception to empathy and emotions. His current projects
focus on the role of visual strategies during empathic judgments and
emotion regulation tasks.
Graduate Students
Bryan Denny
Bryan is a fifth year graduate
student interested in the temporal dynamics of emotion regulation and also
explores how emotion regulation can be improved in people suffering from
borderline personality disorder or major depression. In addition, he is
interested in social cognition more generally and the role that medial
prefrontal cortex plays in attributions about self and others. Prior to
coming to Columbia he worked as a research
assistant with Todd Heatherton at Dartmouth College. After graduating this Spring he will be a
post-doctoral fellow with Harold Koenigsberg at the Mt.
Sinai School of Medicine.
Jennifer
Silvers
Jen got her BA from the
University of Virginia in 2005, and she is now a fifth year graduate
student whose research primarily uses multiple approaches (e.g., behavioral
paradigms, fMRI) to examine what factors enhance and diminish effect emotion
regulation. Her main focus is the developmental trajectory of emotional
reactivity and regulation, as well as how emotion regulation work may be
applied to at-risk groups and individuals with psychopathology (e.g., BPD
patients). Prior to coming to Columbia,
she worked as a research assistant with Alex Martin at NIMH.
Elina
Kanellopoulou
Elina is a fourth year graduate
student interested in understanding and facilitating effective
self-regulation towards the successful pursuit of one's goals. She is currently
exploring the utility and affective impact of employing different mindsets
and cognitive strategies in the context of health choices. She is also
interested in the relationship between existential awareness and
authenticity in decision-making. Elina obtained a BA and Masters degree on
Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford, UK. She was born
and raised in Athens, Greece.
Bruce
Doré
Bruce is a third year graduate
student interested in the regulation of positive emotion in health and psychopathology.
Current projects investigate the cognitive and brain processes that
underlie our ability to 'look on the bright side' in response to negative
life experiences and the motivational factors that influence when and how
we choose to regulate our emotions. He is also broadly interested in the
relationship between lab-based and real-world measures of cognition,
emotion, and behavior. Before coming to Columbia,
Bruce worked with Linda Parker at the University of Guelph
and Alan Kingstone at the University
of British Columbia.
Noam
Zerubavel
Noam is a second year graduate
student interested in the self-regulation of behavior toward tempting
stimuli, and how this is socially influenced. His research focuses on predicting
real-world behavior and related health outcomes using psychological and
neuroimaging paradigms in the lab. Prior to graduate school Noam researched
causes of the precipitous increase in autism prevalence with the
Understanding Autism group at Columbia
University, led by
Dr. Peter Bearman.
Seth
Kallman
Seth is a first year graduate
student interested in self-regulation of behavior and empathic accuracy. He
received his B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester in 2009. Prior to joining
the lab, Seth worked at the National Institute of Mental Health on a
project studying food perception in lean and obese individuals with Drs.
Alex Martin, Kevin Hall, and Kyle Simmons.
Rebecca
Martin
Rebecca is a first year graduate
student interested in how motivational states are influenced by social,
cognitive, and emotional factors, and how these types of emotion-cognition
interactions are represented in the brain. She received her B.A. in History
from New York
University, an M.A.
in Teaching from UC Santa Cruz, and an M.Ed. in Mind, Brain, and Education
from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining the lab,
Rebecca worked in John Gabrieli's lab at MIT on executive functioning and
memory development imaging studies.
Jenny
Porter
Jenny is a first year graduate
student interested in the social, cognitive, and developmental factors and
perceptual cues that impact empathic accuracy in adults and adolescents.
She is currently working on a task to investigate the relationship between
introspective ability for one's own emotions and empathic accuracy for
others' emotions. She received her B.S. in Brain, Behavior & Cognitive
Sciences from the University of Michigan in 2008, and has since worked with Alex
Todorov at Princeton University and with Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University.
Research Assistants
Jocelyn Shu
Jocelyn
is the lab manager and a research assistant working primarily on studies
that investigate emotion regulation in adolescents and patients with
borderline personality disorder. She has also been working on a project
that is exploring the neural regions underlying emotional awareness. Prior
to being at this lab, she received a B.F.A. in Painting through a joint
program with the University of San Francisco and the California College
of the Arts. She began studying psychology as a postbaccalaureate student
at Columbia University.
Katie Insel
Katie
graduated from Columbia
in 2010 with a BA in psychology. Her work focuses on the developmental
trajectory of appetitive and aversive emotion regulation in children and
adolescents.
Jochen Weber
Jochen is a senior imaging data analyst. He brings his all-around elfin magic and
special expertise in mathematics, programming and prior work experience at
BrainVoyager to the SCN Lab to assist with data analysis and visualization.
Alumni (more recent departures
listed first)
Richard Lopez
Rich
was a research assistant from 2009-2011 after receiving his BA in
psychology from Princeton
University, where he
worked in the lab of Alex Todorov. He studied craving regulation in
cigarette smokers and methamphetamine users. He currently is a PhD candidate
at Dartmouth College in the lab of Todd
Heatherton.
Ajay
Satpute
Ajay received his PhD from UCLA in 2008,
and is now working as a research scientist
in the lab of Lisa Feldmann-Barrett. He has interests in the neural bases
of social cognition, emotion and learning and in developing new analytic
and computational methods to study their interactions.
Jamil
Zaki
Jamil got his PhD from Columbia University
in 2010, and is now a postdoctoral fellow working with Jason Mitchell at
the Harvard Center for Brain Science. His
research focuses on the cognitive and neural bases of social behavior,
particularly w.r.t. empathy and empathic accuracy, social influence, and
altruism. In Fall 2012, Jamil will be taking an Assistant Professor
position at Stanford
University.
Chukwudi Onyemekwu
Chuk
was a research assistant from 2009-2010 and is now working at the Substance
Treatment and Research Service (S.T.A.R.S) at the New York State
Psychiatric Institute, where he investigates the role of stress sensitivity
in perpetuating cocaine use after abstinence. He is currently applying to
med school for the 2012 matriculation period.
Hedy
Kober
Hedy received her PhD from Columbia University
in 2009 and was a post-doc for one year and now is an Assistant
Professor of Psychiatry at Yale
University. She
continues to collaborate on projects examining the regulation of appetitive
desires in healthy adults and in substance abusers as well as meta-analyses
of the neural systems underlying social cognition and emotion regulation.
Katherine Remy
Katherine
was a research assistant and graduate of Columbia with a BA in Psychology who won
the prestigious Jennifer A Pack Prize. She worked on studies of craving
regulation in substance abusing populations, and emotion regulation in
borderline personality disorder and children. She now resides in Norway.
Kim
Montgomery
Kim was a post-doctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health
and Society Scholars Program.
She has interests in the neural bases of social cognition, the
mirror system, perspective taking, interpersonal relationships and
health. She is currently working on
a project that examines their inter-relationships. She is currently a public policy Fellow
in Washington DC.
Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Peter
was a research assistant from 2007-200 after receiving his BA from Columbia. He worked on
studies of emotion regulation, pain regulation, and their relationship to
addiction. He Currently is a graduate student
in Psychology at Princeton
University.
Ethan
Kross
Ethan was a post-doctoral fellow from 2007-2008 and is now an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He is an on-going collaborator on
projects examining the use of different forms of cognitive construal (e.g.
those involve accepting as opposed to reinterpreting the meaning of
stimuli) to regulate emotion.
Josh
Davis
Josh received his PhD in Spring
2008 and is now a Term Assistant
Professor at Barnard college. He
continues collaborative work on projects examining the role of the body
(i.e. somatic and behavioral expression) in emotion and emotion
regulation. Josh has broad interests
in the nature of psychological theories, and theory-building more
generally.
Andreas
Olsson
Andreas was a post-doc from 2005-2007 and
is now an Associate Professor at the
Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
He is an-going collaborator on projects examining the behavioral and neural
mechanisms mediating emotions in social contexts, including the ways in
which cognitive goals and strategies can affect the emotional processes
involved in the perception of, and learning from, others.
Brent
Hughes
Brent was the SCAN Unit lab
manager and a research assistant working on projects examining the neural
bases of emotion regulation and pain.
Brent was a U.
of Michigan undergrad
and after graduating, managed the lab of Dr. Steve Taylor. Brent is now a graduate
student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Matthew Davidson
Matthew was the SCAN Unit systems administrator, go-to
person for computing and programming needs, and fMRI data analyst. Matt has a sardonic wit and the most
complete collection of politically savvy t-shirts this side of the Hudson. He is now a graduate student in the
Department of Psychology at Columbia
working with Hakwan Lau.
Sonja Schmer-Galunder
Sonja was the SCAN Unit lab manager, and in that role
worked on various projects related to stress and cognition and emotion
regulation. She has a master’s
degree in sociology and was the manager for the Davachi Lab at NYU prior to
moving uptown.
Collaborators
Lisa
Feldmann-Barrett, Ph.D. website
Jennifer Bartz, Ph.D.
website
Jennifer Beer, Ph.D.
website
Niall Bolger, Ph.D.
website
B.J. Casey, Ph.D.
website
Joan Chiao, Ph.D. website
Geraldine Downey, Ph.D.
website
Michael Green, Ph.D.
website
John Gabrieli, Ph.D.
website
James Gross, Ph.D. website
Hedy Kober, Ph.D. website
Harold Koenigsberg, M.D. website
John Mann, M.D. website
Walter Mischel, Ph.D. website
Barbara Stanley, Ph.D. website
Tor Wager, Ph.D. website
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