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- Nichole Bouffard completed her PhD in 2024 at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Morris Moscovitch and Morgan Barense. She is now completing her postdoc with Jeff Zacks and Zach Reagh and is supported by the NIH T32. Her work is aimed at uncovering how the precise neural timescales of activity in the hippocampus are related to aspects of event cognition and memory and how the neural timescales of activity change with age. Nichole is using the novel fMRI autocorrelation method she developed in her PhD to determine the direct links between intrinisc neural timescales of individual voxels and the coarse vs fine components of memory as well as the the organization of intrinsic signals in the hippocampus and how they are impacted in aging.
(mentored by Zach Reagh & Jeffrey Zacks)
- Alana Muller completed her Ph.D. in 2025 at the University of Arizona with Arne Ekstrom studying human spatial navigation. She is currently a postdoctoral research scholar working with Denise Head to extend her work to aging populations. Her work is broadly focused on understanding the factors that allow for efficient navigation and how those systems change as we age. She is especially interested in investigating the roles that body movements and visual information contribute to navigating by using increasingly ecologically valid designs and eye tracking. Alana is also extending work she did during her Ph.D. investigating how stress may (or may not) shift navigation strategies from flexible shortcut-taking to rigid habit-following. Her work with Dr. Head will include using MRI, fMRI, and DTI to understand the neural networks involved in both strategies and how they change with stress.
(mentored by Denise Head and Zach Reagh)
- Maverick Smith, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral researcher in the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis with Dr. Jeff Zacks. His research focuses on memory interventions for older adults and individuals in the early stages of Alzheimer Disease, employing methods such as behavioral studies, ecological momentary assessment, and fMRI. Maverick’s work explores the role of event segmentation—how people break down their experiences into meaningful events—and its impact on memory. His studies investigate whether improving event segmentation can improve memory retention in young adults, cognitively healthy older adults, and older adults with elevated biomarkers of AD. Using innovative experiments, Maverick aims to develop theoretically informed strategies for improving event memory.
(mentored by Jeffrey Zacks)