Graduate Students
Alexandra Fink
Graduate Assistant
Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience
Alexandra Fink is a Neuroscience PhD Candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is co-mentored by Ignacio Saez, PhD and Xiaosi Gu, PhD. Alexandra specializes in integrating multi-region human intracranial electrophysiology and computational psychiatry to investigate aberrant reward processing in psychiatric disorders, specifically Major Depressive Disorder. Her main PhD project aims to elucidate the behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of counterfactual reward processing in humans with MDD. She graduated from Duke University with a B.S. in Neuroscience in 2020, where she studied conserved brain network features between two mouse models of MDD using multi-region electrophysiology under Kafui Dzirasa, MD, PhD. After completing her PhD, Alexandra hopes to bring her expertise in electrophysiology and computational modeling of behavior to the biotechnology sector.
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Qixiu Fu, B.A.
Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience (co-mentored by Xiaosi Gu and Ignacio Saez)
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Qixiu Fu obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in Psychology from New York University in 2020. Generally speaking, Qixiu is interested in understanding the computational mechanisms of psychological experiences in healthy and pathological contexts. Right now, she is trying to understand value-based decision-making in treatment-resistant depression patients who undergo deep brain stimulation. When Qixiu gets frustrated with whatever she is doing, she likes to binge-watch anime.
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Arianna Neal Davis, B.S.
M.D./Ph.D. candidate
B.S. in Psychology and Neuroscience, Yale University
I've always been fascinated by how neurochemical and molecular interactions in the brain can give rise to the mind that creates such complex higher-order cognitive states -- such as mood, emotion, and learning -- as well as how computational models can be used to elucidate and interrogate the mechanisms underlying these cognitive processes. I am specifically curious about the neurocomputational and neurochemical signatures of happiness and how invasive voltammetric methods can be used to probe the neurochemistry of happiness as it varies along naturalistic variables.
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Ivan Wolanksy
M.D. Candidate
B.A. in Data Science, Columbia University
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I am interested in utilizing data science and artificial intelligence to explore new ways of understanding psychiatric illnesses. I hope to help create tools that can be used in clinical settings to assist mental health professionals in making diagnoses, in addition to creating biomarkers that can be used to more concretely make diagnoses.
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Alexis Baptiste
PREP Scholar
B.S. in Neuroscience concentration in Psychology, Loyola University New Orleans
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I am interested in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders in relation to self-concept, self-identity, and social identity in order to create alternative holistic treatments to alleviate mental illness. Additionally, I am interested in understanding the association between learning, negative emotional stimuli, and neuroplasticity using neuroimaging and computational modeling techniques. I intend to obtain a MD/PhD or PhD degree with a focus in Neuroscience in the future.