Alexandria Barlowe

Alexandria Barlowe is a Ph.D. student in Brain, Behavior and Cognition.She is from is Medford, New York, and she received her BA in Psychology with a Biology minor from SUNY Geneseo in 2019. After graduation, she worked as a Behavioral Support Specialist with populations that had mental illnesses, chemical addictions, intellectual disabilities or a combination of the three across Long Island with Family Residences and Essential Enterprises. She also worked as a Clinical Research Assistant on the Natural History of Traumatic Brain Injury Study to investigate the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) over time in military members and their families at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She came to Boston in 2021 to join the Sur Lab at MIT as a Research Technician, working on a multitude of projects investigating the Pulvinar-prefrontal network’s role in decision-making under perceptual uncertainty, state dependent cortical encoding of reward, value and action switching, and the efficacy of a 3-chain peptide (GFP) in rescuing symptoms of Rhett Syndrome using molecular techniques.

She is now co-advised by Dr. Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Dr. Sam Ling; she aims to uncover the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying arousal and social cognition, specifically focusing on the contribution of subcortical structures like the locus coeruleus (LC) in higher level cognition and behavior. Her current work includes use of physiological measures such as pupillometry and electrodermal activity as proxies for subcortical activity.