I am the PI of a cognitive neuroscience lab at Temple University. We have a very collegial department and many PI’s collaborate. Jason Chein and Tanya Giovanetti are two of my current collaborators. I also have an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania and have close collaborations with several great people there: Anjan Chatterjee, Branch Coslett, Geoff Aguirre, Dave Wolk, Joe Kable, and Sabrina Smith.

My Academic Heritage

A long time ago, in a state far far away, I received my undergraduate degree. My BA is from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, one of the best places in the world! At one time, they also had one of the best football and basketball teams . . .

After that, I moved to New Haven Connecticut, a great school with awful football and basketball.  I worked first with Tom Carew, then Marvin Chun, in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. My dissertation was on a type of statistical learning called contextual cueing. I also began doing research with Yuhong Jiang on visual working memory. For my postdoc, I stayed in New Haven but moved to the medical school to work with John Gore on biomedical imaging.

I had a peculiar effect on all my PIs at Yale – as soon as I worked with them they left Yale (Tom went to Irvine; Marvin and John went to Vanderbilt). So I decided it was time for me to leave Yale as well. This brought me to Philadelphia.

Current Research Interests

This is an exciting time to do cognitive neuroscience research.  Our laboratory uses a variety of techniques to answer questions about working memory, episodic memory, and social semantic memory (see the lab’s publication list for more details about this work). 

Broader Impact of Research

I am very interested in the educational applications of our research. To that end, I make a concerted effort to integrate research with education. In the future, we hope to extend our research on basic memory processes to understand the best techniques for improving retention of material learned in school.