Principal Investigator

 

 

 

 

 

Dara S. Manoach, PhD is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is a neuropsychologist who received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. She completed a clinical psychology internship at McLean Hospital and a fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at the Behavioral Neurology Unit of Beth Israel Hospital. She is based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for biomedical imaging and in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Faculty

Bengi Baran, Ph.D. is an Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She received her PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She completed the postdoctoral training program in Sleep, Circadian and Respiratory Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School’s Division of Sleep Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the cognitive function of sleep in neuropsychiatric disorders. She uses MRI (event-related and resting state fMRI and diffusion weighted imaging), sleep EEG and behavioral testing methods. In her spare time she studies wine and food.

 

Angela Fang, Ph.D. received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Boston University in 2014, and her A.B. in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in 2007. Her research interests involve the neural correlates of self-focused processing in psychiatric disorders and their relationship to treatment outcome. She is also interested in the use of intranasal oxytocin to modulate cognitive biases in patients with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive related disorders.

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Dimitris S. Mylonas, Ph.D. received his PhD in Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Technical University of Athens in 2014. His research interests include the development and implementation of new analysis methods to neuroimaging data (EEG/MEG and MRI). He joined the Manoach Lab as a postodoctoral research fellow in October 2015. He is currently investigating the role of brain oscillations during wake and sleep in learning and sleep-dependent memory impairment in schizophrenia.

 

Will Coon, Ph.D. earned his B.Sc. in Psychology from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Science from the State University of New York at Albany in 2015. For his doctoral dissertation, he worked with intracranial EEG (iEEG) to study how oscillatory dynamics govern the timing of cortical signaling in the brain and to identify areas of eloquent cortex prior to resective brain surgery. Will is interested in neuronal oscillations, sleep-enhanced learning, and memory consolidation, and enjoys devising novel analytic approaches with applications in electrophysiology and statistics. In his present work, he uses concurrent EEG+iEEG and high-density EEG, coupled with tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning, to investigate how the spatiotemporal organization of coupled oscillations in the sleeping brain subserve “offline” learning and memory consolidation, and how these processes go awry in schizophrenia and autism.

 

Zhaoyue Shi, Ph.D. completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Dr. John C. Gore. During her Ph.D, she investigated the neural basis of BOLD fMRI signals in non-human primate brain, as well as translating fMRI and electrophysiology analysis techniques to the clinic to better understand the functional connectivity of human brain. Her current research is focused on developing MEG/EEG signal processing and computational modeling towards the goal of investigating sleep-dependent memory consolidation in healthy and schizophrenic populations.

 

Bryan Baxter, Ph.D. completed his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Bryan’s Ph.D. work examined how transcranial current stimulation interacts with ongoing activity in the brain to improve performance of noninvasive Brain-Computer Interfaces. His current interests are an extension of this work examining how noninvasive stimulation interacts with endogenous neural activity during sleep and how this interaction can be utilized to improve cognition and memory. He is also interested in bioethics related to neural stimulation in populations with neuropsychiatric conditions.

Research Associates

Lin Zhu, PhD received her B.Sc degree in electrical engineering in China, and her PhD in biomedical engineering from Ecole Polytechnique, University of Montreal, Canada in 2016. Her previous research focused on measuring load-induced electrical potentials at the surface of the human knee. Her recent research interest covers sleep deficits in schizophrenia using MEG and EEG simultaneously.

Research Coordinators

Olivia Larson, BA & Sc received her interdisciplinary BA & Sc degree in Cognitive Science from McGill University in 2017. During her undergrad, she used eye-tracking methods to investigate how mechanisms of visual attention are influenced by high-level social information. She is currently conducting research that uses high-density EEG and MRI to investigate sleep-dependent memory consolidation in individuals with schizophrenia.

 

Christine Talbot, MS received her BS in neuroscience from Dickinson College and her MS in neuroscience from Brandeis University. Her work at Brandeis focused on aging, affect, and cognition as it relates to the memory trade-off effect. In the Manoach lab, she is investigating sleep-dependent memory consolidation in schizophrenia using MEG and EEG.

 

Sasha Machado, BSc received her BSc in Neuroscience at Brown University in May 2018. During her time at Brown she focused on using molecular and biochemical techniques to develop a system for trans-synaptic fluorescent labeling of neurons. She is currently investigating the role of sleep-dependent memory consolidation and the thalamic reticular nucleus in Autism Spectrum Disorder using MEG/EEG.

Alumni

External Collaborators

Jason Barton, MD PhD: Neuroophthalmology

Frank Guenther, MS, PhD: Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences and Biomedical Engineering

Dost Ongur, MD PhD

Shaun Purcell, PhD: Sleep and Neuropsychiatric Genetics

Ann Shinn, MD, MPH: Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation

Bob Stickgold, PhD: Sleep and Cognition

Matt Wilson, PhD:  Memory

In Memoriam

9/27/80 – 7/17/10

Jesse Friedman, BA was an exceptional research assistant in the Manoach Lab for 2 years. Jesse specialized in freesurfer data analysis and quality control on several ongoing projects within the lab and with its collaborators.