Postdocs
Sarah Banker, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Sarah is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, co-mentored by Dr. Xiaosi Gu, Dr. Jennifer Foss-Feig and Dr. Daniela Schiller. She is interested in the intersections of social cognition, stress, and neurodevelopment. Her dissertation work combined computational modeling, neuroimaging, and clinical assessment to examine higher-level social cognition in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and related conditions.
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Ayaka Kato, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Ayaka Kato is is a postdoctoral fellow co-mentored by Xiaosi Gu and Ignacio Saez. She attained her Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in March 2023 and holds a Master of Science in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor and a Master of Biological Science from the University of Tokyo. Ayaka’s research focus encompasses computational psychiatry, dopamine, motivation, and addiction. She employs computational modeling, intracranial recording, and neuroimaging techniques to investigate these areas of study.
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Alisa M. Loosen, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Alisa is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, investigating neurocomputational mechanisms of reward and effort learning through the analysis of intracranial recordings in humans. She holds an MSc in cognitive neuroscience from University College London (UCL) and completed her PhD research in computational psychiatry at UCL and Yale University. During her doctoral studies, she explored learning and decision-making alterations in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
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Eric Sanford, M.D., Ph.D.
Psychiatry Resident
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Eric is a psychiatry resident in the research track at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was previously in the Medical Scientist Training Program at University of Pennsylvania, where he received an MD and a PhD in Genomics and Computational Biology. He is interested in computational modeling of dyadic interactions in psychotherapy, using both facial image analysis and natural language processing methods. He is also interested in identifying computational markers of psychotherapy response.
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Blair Shevlin, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Blair Shevlin is a postdoctoral fellow co-mentored by Xiaosi Gu and Laura Berner. He graduated from Goucher College with a degree in Psychology and then received his master’s degree in Experimental Psychology from Towson University. In 2022, he earned his PhD in Decision Psychology from The Ohio State University. Dr. Shevlin’s research examines the role of value, attention, and motivation in everyday decisions. He specializes in computational modeling, incorporating theoretical perspectives from psychology, neuroscience, and economics to study how people approach their decisions in a variety of contexts.
Marjorie Xie, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
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My scientific interests include 1) how humans form beliefs through social interactions, 2) relationships between self-efficacy beliefs, mood, and avoidance/approach behavior, and 3) mechanisms by which psychotherapy shapes memories and beliefs.
On the engineering side, I am interested in developing closed loop systems for measuring affective states and discovering useful therapeutic interventions.
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