MEET THE TEAM
Principal Investigator
Postdoctoral Fellows
Graduate Students
Ricardo Morales
Ricardo studied psychology in the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He later earned a M.Sc. in Neuroscience from the Universidad de Chile, working with Eugenio Rodriguez on the neural correlates of bistable perception. Currently he is a Cognitive Neuroscience PhD student interested in episodic memory, executive functions and counterfactual thinking.
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Anna Smith
Anna is a third year Psychology & Neuroscience Ph.D. student working with Paul Seli and Felipe De Brigard. After receiving her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Carleton College, Anna spent two years working with Dr. Michael Yassa on studies of episodic memory mechanisms and performance trajectories associated with healthy and disordered aging. She hopes to tie in her previous work on the nature of episodic and semantic representations, her love for interdisciplinary science, and a personal drive to create and consume art, to pursue a body of research that illuminates stages and conditions of the creative process. Anna also serves as Co-director and Instructor for Duke Neurosciences Camp, a residential summer camp for high schoolers.
Gabriela Fernández
Gabriela earned her B.A. in Psychology from Universidad Javeriana and her M.A. from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). She worked as Lab Manager in the Laboratory of Moral Judgments and Emotions with Santiago Amaya and William Jiménez-Leal. Currently, she is a Psychology & Neuroscience PhD student working with Felipe De Brigard and Kevin LaBar trying to disentangle the relationship between forgiveness and memory. She is also interested in moral psychology and exhaustion (cognitive and emotional) in the face of adversity.
Nina Van Rooy
Nina is a Philosophy PhD student at Duke. She earned an M.A. in Philosophy at King’s College, London. She has broad interests in philosophy of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, but she is particularly interested in the relationship between the various levels at which the mind is studied and related issues of reductionism and multiple realizability. She is currently working with Trey Boone and Felipe De Brigard on a project that aims to give a comprehensive account of the ontology and epistemology of neural networks in neuroscience.
Lab Manager
Kaylee Miceli
Kaylee earned her B.A. in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Religion from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021, where she worked as a research assistant in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Laboratory under Kelly Giovanello. Now, she manages the IMC Lab and coordinates the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy. She is interested in episodic counterfactual thinking, the philosophy of neuroscience, and the interaction of memory and interpersonal relationships.
Research Assistants
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Morgan Biele is a junior intending to major in Neuroscience and is interested in the medical humanities. She is interested in studying how memory and imagination can influence outlook and the way people experience the world around them as positive or negative.
Sarah LoCurto is a junior double-majoring in Neuroscience and Philosophy. She is broadly interested in cognitive neuroscience, moral philosophy, and their intersection, particularly in the context of emotions and mental health.
Aisha Greene is a senior majoring in Neuroscience with minors in Chemistry and biology. She is interested in studying how instances affect counterfactual thinking, how counterfactual thinking helps us understand memory more broadly, and how this may affect our present mental health.
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Sara Rose Shannon is a junior majoring in Neuroscience with minors in Chemistry and Global Health. She is predominantly interested in the neuroscience of consciousness, specifically both the moral and neural foundations behind unconscious and conscious decision making. She is currently exploring the relationship between forgiveness and memory through cognitive and affective processes.
Anna Ghelfi is a freshman intending to major in Neuroscience and do a certificate in Digital Intelligence. She is primarily interested in cognitive neuroscience, especially in the relationship between conscious and unconscious behavior. She is currently exploring the relationship between memory and imagination through mental control.
Collaborators
past and present
Donna Rose Addis, Rotman Research Institute
Tim Brady, University of California, San Diego
Paul Bello, US Naval Research Laboratory
Roberto Cabeza, Duke University
Simon Davis, Duke University
Kelly S. Giovanello, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Sangeet Khemlani, US Naval Research Laboratory
Joshua Knobe, Yale University
Tamar Kushnir, Duke University
Kevin LaBar, Duke University
Kourken Michaelian, Université Grenoble Alpes
John Pearson, Duke University
Sarah Robins, University of Kansas
Zach Rosenthal, Duke University
Daniel L. Schacter, Harvard University
Paul Seli, Duke University
R. Nathan Spreng, McGill University
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Duke University
Peggy L. St. Jacques, University of Alberta
Nina Strohminger, University of Pennsylvania
Karl K. Szpunar, University of Illinois, Chicago
Marty Woldorff, Duke University
Kristina earned a B.A. in Psychology and English from Duke University and went on to earn her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Kristina studies visual attention, perception, and consciousness as well as how these constructs impact causal and moral reasoning. She is currently using behavioral, eye tracking, and EEG techniques for a multidimensional view. Kristina is also interested in exploring how her research interfaces with philosophical concepts regarding free will and moral responsibility.
Samuel earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Wake Forest University and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His work focuses on the psychology of acting over time and how vigilance interacts with attention, memory, and control to facilitate temporally extended agency. Additionally, he works on normative questions of moral responsibility — especially responsibility for negligence — and has an abiding interest in the history of early modern philosophy.
Visiting Fellow
Trey earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Lewis & College Clark, an M.A. in Philosophy from Simon Fraser University, and a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on explanation and causal inference in neuroscience, with specific interest in how the robustness of neural functions presents challenges for standard approaches to causal inference in biological systems. Trey also has active interests in philosophy of perception related to attention and vagueness in perceptual representation.
Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor of Philosophy
Associate Professor, Psychology and Neuroscience
Core Faculty, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences & Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Felipe earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Colombia, where he studied philosophy and neuropsychology. He earned a masters degree from Tufts University, where he studied philosophy and cognitive science under the direction of Daniel Dennett. Then, he earned a doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied philosophy and cognitive neuroscience under the direction of Jesse Prinz and Kelly Giovanello, respectively. Before coming to Duke, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in Daniel Schacter's Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab at Harvard University. With Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, he launched the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy that have been hosted every year at Duke since 2016.
Kevin is a PhD student who joined the lab through the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program. He received a B.S. in Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he worked in the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (RAIR) Lab, and later worked as a computer scientist at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Currently, Kevin is working with Felipe De Brigard, John Pearson, and NRL to investigate how the brain coordinates cognitive processes (e.g., attention, perception, and memory) to support inference and reasoning in a variety of domains.
Leonard Faul
Leonard received a B.S. in Psychology and Biology from the University of Louisville in 2017, where he also worked as a research assistant in the Neuroimaging Laboratory of Cognitive, Affective, and Motoric Processes. He joined the lab through the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program, and currently works with Kevin LaBar and Felipe De Brigard to investigate the interaction of emotional experiences with memory consolidation and modification.
Shenyang Huang
Shenyang joined the lab in 2018 as an undergraduate research assistant. He received a B.S. in Neuroscience and Mathematics from Duke University in 2020. He is now a second-year PhD student in the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program, and he is interested in investigating how the functional networks of the brain support declarative memory and moral reasoning.
