Cognitive & Brain Science Students

 Lisa Kemp is a 4th year Cognitive and Brain Science student supervised by Dr. Janet McDonald in the Psycholinguistics Lab. She received her Master’s degree in Linguistics from California State University, Long Beach and conducts research in the areas of second language vocabulary learning, healthy aging and applied linguistics.

Kacie Mennie received her B.A. from University of Michigan - Dearborn and her M.A. from LSU. She is entering her 5th year of the Cognitive and Brain Sciences program. Broadly, she is interested in how associations are formed in long-term memory, and how emotional arousal impacts these associations. She is also interested in how this type of research can be applied to real-world situations. In her spare time, Kacie enjoys cooking, photography, and walking her dogs.

Katherine Moen is a 4th year Cognitive and Brain Science psychology student in Dr. Beck’s lab. She received her MS in Experimental Psychology from Seton Hall University in 2014. Katherine is primarily interested in the interaction between visual working memory and long-term memory, as well as directed forgetting. She is specifically interested in researching these areas by tracking eye movements. Outside of school, Katherine enjoys cooking, watching football and reading science fiction.

Samantha Spitler is a fifth year cognitive psychology student working with Dr. Hicks. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology at St. John Fisher College and masters degree in Experimental Psychology at Georgia Regents University. Her research interests include the relationship between emotional events and false memories, recognition and prospective memory. Besides school, she enjoys going to the dog park with her puppy, reading, running, and exploring Baton Rouge/New Orleans.

Corey McGill is a 5th-year graduate student interested in the topics of working memory, general fluid intelligence, rehearsal, and auditory distraction. He is currently working on research projects examining the cause of the relationship between working memory and general fluid intelligence, as well as re-examining the role of rehearsal in working memory systems. 

Juan Ventura is a third year Cognitive and Brain Science student in Dr. Emily Elliott’s lab. He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and completed research with Dr. Peter Delaney, Dr. Michael Kane, and Dr. Thomas Kwapil. His interests include the cause and origin of individual differences in working memory capacity, how capacity limits can be enhanced by training, and the relationship between working memory and higher-order cognition. When not at school, Juan plays the alto saxophone, reads working memory books, and exercises at the gym.

Katie Stanko is a fourth year student in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Program working in Dr. Cherry's lab. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and criminology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She received both her master’s degree and graduate certificate in Life-Span Studies from LSU in 2017.  She is interested in post-disaster effects on healthy aging and is currently working on a project to examine disaster stress effects on cognition, health and well-being across the adult lifespan in individuals impacted by the historic 2016 flooding in Baton Rouge, LA.

Bethany Lyon is a 6th year student working with Dr. Jason Hicks. She received her Bachelor's Degrees in Psychology and Biology from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and her Master's Degree from Louisiana State University. Her research interests include Prospective Memory and how it changes with increased age. Beth is also interested more broadly in cognitive changes that occur in healthy aging. Aside from school, she also enjoys sewing, playing nintendo games, and gardening.

Sunghyun Kim is a 3rd year cognitive and brain science student in Dr. Beck’s lab. He received his master’s degree from Korea University. He is interested in how top-down factors such as working memory and context influence allocation of attention. He likes listening to music, running, riding a bicycle, watching drama, and eating food but not cooking.

Bryan Franks

Daniella Cash

Laura Heisick is a fourth year graduate student in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences doctoral program. She is broadly interested in memory and general cognitive processes, especially the relationship between encoding and retrieval dynamics, general face perception, and physiological indices of memory, such as pupillometry.

Lauryn Burleigh is a second year graduate student in Dr. Greening's Cognitive Neuroscience of Affect and Psychopathology (CNAPs) Lab. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of New Orleans in 2015. Lauryn conducts studies utilizing the fMRI at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, researching the neural mechanisms of emotion and cognition. She is currently studying fear in imagination and is more broadly interested in the processing of emotions in anxiety and depression. 

Tyler Robinson

Alan Harrison

Stephanie Saltzmann is a first year graduate student in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences program in the Beck Visual Cognition Lab. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology with a minor in Sociology from Louisiana State University. Her research interests include visual memory and attention with a specific interest in eye movements. Outside of school, Stephanie enjoys reading comic books, cycling, and watching movies.

Xinrui Jiang is a third year graduate student in Dr. Greening's Cognitive Neuroscience of Affect and Psychopathology (CNAPs) Lab. She received her Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Colorado State University and East China Normal University, and her Master’s degree from Louisiana State University. Her research interests lie primarily in the biological basis of autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.