|
Director
Kevin Ochsner,
Ph.D.
Kevin received his bachelor's degree 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
Asociate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University.
Kevin's research interests include the psychological and neural processes
involved in emotion, pain, self-regulation, self perception, 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.
His teaching includes
seminars on social
cognitive neuroscience and current
topics in cognitive neuroscience (that focuses in some years on fMRI
methodology and other years on functional neuroanatomy) as well as a
lecture course on experimental psychological methods for studying emotion
and social cognition.
Email
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Hedy
Kober
Hedy received her PhD from Columbia University in 2009. She is working
on projects examining the regulation of appetitive desires in healthy
adults and in substance abusers. She
also has worked on meta-analyses of the functions associated with medial
prefrontal cortex and the effects of meditation training on emotional and
social cognitive abilities. She will
join the faculty of the Yale University Department of Psychiatry in 2010.
Ajay
Satpute
Ajay received his PhD from UCLA in 2008. 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. One of his current projects examines the
computations medial PFC performs in both social cognitive and affective
contexts.
Graduate Students
Jamil
Zaki
Jamil is a fourth year graduate
student with interests in empathy, emotion and social cognition. A current passion is a multi-faceted
collaborative (with Niall Bolger) project that uses field,
psychophysiological and fMRI methods to examine the neural and
psychological bases of empathy and empathic accuracy.
Bryan Denny
Bryan
is a second year graduate student interested in how we learn to be better
emotion regulators. He also 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 University.
Jennifer
Silvers
Jen is a second year graduate
student with interests in social rejection and emotion regulation. Prior to coming to Columbia she worked at NIH in the lab of
Alex Martin and has done work on both autism and oxytocin.
Bruce
Dore
Bruce is a first year graduate
student from the University of Guelph in Canada. He has interests in
emotion and emotion regulation, especially in naturalistic contexts.
Research Assistants
Jochen Weber
Jochen is a senior imaging data analyst. He brings his expertise in mathematics,
programming and prior work experience at BrainVoyager to the SCN Lab to
assist with data analysis and visualization.
Katherine Remy
Katherine,
also known as Kat, is a research assistant who recently graduated from Columbia with a BA in
Psychology, having won the prestigious Jennifer A Pack Prize. She is
working on studies of craving regulation in substance abusing populations,
and emotion regulation in borderline personality disorder and children.
Chukwudi Onyemekwu
Chuk is
a research assistant, and recent Vanderbilt graduate, working on studies of
emotion regulation and their relationship to addiction.
Richard Lopez
Rich
graduated from Princeton
University in 2009 where
he worked in the lab of Alex Todorov.
He now is working on studies of emotion regulation and substance
abuse.
Alumni
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 from Columbia. He worked on
studies of emotion regulation, pain regulation, and their relationship to
addiction. In Fall 2009 he begins
graduate school 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 a research fellow 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 1st year
graduate student at the University
of Texas at Austin.
Teal Eich
Teal was a
post-bac in the lab, worked for two year as a graduate student at UCLA, and
returned to Columbia
in Fall 2008 to resume her graduate studies on the East Coast. She has broad interests in theory of
mind, self-representation, and currently is working on a collaborative
project examining different modes of affective judgment.
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 lab manager for the Davachi Lab at NYU
prior to moving uptown.
Collaborators
Lisa
Feldmann-Barrett, Ph.D. website
Jennifer Beer, Ph.D.
website
Niall Bolger, Ph.D.
website
Joan Chiao, Ph.D.
website
Geraldine Downey, Ph.D.
website
John Gabrieli, Ph.D.
website
James Gross, Ph.D. website
Harold Koenigsberg, M.D. website
Barbara Stanley, Ph.D. website
Tor Wager, Ph.D. website
|