Michael Esterman is a co-founder of the Boston Attention and Learning Laboratory. He received his degree in cognitive psychology at UC Berkeley, where he investigated spatial attention and object perception using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In his post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, he investigated the neural mechanisms of cognitive control, with an emphasis on using pattern classification to decode attentional states. He is now an Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Associate Director of the VA Boston Neuroimaging Center. Mike’s current interests include investigating the neural basis of attentional control and distractibility, in both healthy young and old adults, as well as in patients with PTSD, TBI, and focal brain injury.
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Joe DeGutis is a co-founder of the Boston Attention and Learning Laboratory. He is an investigator at the VA Boston Healthcare System, a fellow at the Harvard Vision Lab working with Ken Nakayama, and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He earned his PhD in experimental psychology specializing in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation focused on the neural mechanisms of visual learning in healthy controls and cognitive rehabilitation of developmental prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize faces). Joe’s overarching research interests are on cognitive rehabilitation of attention, particularly the ability to focus and sustain attention, in populations that include hemispatial neglect, ADHD, PTSD/TBI and age-related cognitive decline. In addition, he is also interested in the cognitive deficits associated with prosopagnosia and exploring rehabilitation possibilities for this disorder.
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David Rothlein is a postdoctoral researcher working for the Boston VA. After earning a BS in Cognitive Science from the University of Connecticut, he graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a PhD in Cognitive Science. His doctoral research involved using behavioral and fMRI experiments to study modality specific and abstract representations of letters in the mind and brain. His current research involves using stimulus similarity to investigate the role of perceptual processing in sustained attention tasks and using multi-voxel pattern analyses with fMRI data to investigate how attention interacts with the transmission of information in the brain.
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Audreyana Jagger-Rickels is a postdoctoral researcher at the Boston VA. She earned her BS in Psychology at Wittenberg University in 2013 and her Ph.D. in Psychology at Southern Illinois University in 2019. Audreyana's dissertation examined resting-state fMRI functional and effective connectivity patterns in adolescents with and without neuropsychological and learning disorders. Currently, her research in the BAL Lab focuses on discovering unique patterns of resting-state connectivity (i.e., Biophenotypes) in PTSD and other aspects of translational neuroimaging.
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Alison Campbell is a postdoctoral researcher at the Boston VA. She received her PhD from the University of Victoria, where her dissertation focused on electrophysiological and psychophysical techniques to examine implicit face categorization and identity recognition. Much of this research involved tracking the emergence of identity recognition after real-world interaction and personal familiarization. Her current work focuses on understanding the perceptual and memory mechanisms that underlie the impressive human capacity to learn faces by examining the patterns of abnormalities in developmental prosopagnosiacs – a special population of individuals with pervasive face recognition deficits.