Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science

Community Spotlights

Meet the scientists, students and staff driving discovery.

News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Debbie Yee

Yee is a recipient of a competitive NIH Pathway to Independence Award, or K99/R00, which gives postdocs five years of financial support to help them transition into a tenure-track faculty position. Along with postdoc Darcy Diesburg, Yee this fall organized a retreat for Carney postdocs to build community and share resources.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Elena Luchkina

Elena Luchkina is a research scientist at Harvard University working with Dr. Elizabeth Spelke. She is also a research associate at UC Berkeley where she collaborates with Dr. Fei Xu. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University under the supervision of Drs. James Morgan and Dave Sobel in 2019 and completed postdoctoral training with Dr. Sandra Waxman at Northwestern University.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Arif Hamid

Arif Hamid is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Darcy Diesburg

Darcy Diesburg is a postdoctoral fellow in the neuroscience department and works in the lab of Stephanie Jones.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Saud Alhusaini

Saud Alhusaini (M.D. Ph.D.) is an assistant professor in the Department of neurology within the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University and a movement disorders specialist practicing at Rhode Island Hospital.
News from Carney

Robyn St. Laurent: Rewiring the OCD Brain

Robyn St. Laurent is postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown in 2019.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Chloe Zimmerman

Chloe Zimmerman is an M.D./Ph.D. Candidate in Neuroscience working in Stephanie Jones and Frederike Petzschner’s labs.
News from Carney

Nikos Tapinos: Harnessing the Power of Glial Cells

Nikos Tapinos is an associate professor in the department of neurosurgery and Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox associate professor of ophthalmology and visual science.
News from Carney

Matt Nassar: Exploring Memory’s Complexity

Matt Nassar is an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience. He is the principal investigator in the Learning, Memory & Decision lab which uses computational models to better understand how the brain represents and stores information for effective decision making.
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Community Spotlight: Michael A. Long

Michael A. Long, Ph.D. 2003, is a professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Physiology in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
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Community Spotlight: Ted Huey

Ted Huey is the director of the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital, an affiliate of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
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Community Spotlight: Nina Gray

Nina Gray earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Brown University in 2006. She is the Assistant Vice Provost for Research at New York University.
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Community Spotlight: Heather McCrea

Heather McCrea graduated from Brown University in 2002 with an ScB in Biochemistry. She is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Holtz Children's Hospital/Jackson Health System and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Miami.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight Sonia Mayoral

Sonia Mayoral is an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and an assistant professor of brain science at the Carney Institute of Brain Science.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Daphna Buchsbaum

Daphna Buchsbaum is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She directs the Computational Cognitive Development Lab and its sister lab, the Brown Dog Lab.
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Community Spotlight: Yu-Wen Alvin Huang

Yu-Wen Alvin Huang is the GLF Translational Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry, joining the faculty of Brown Biology and Medicine in July, 2019.
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Community Spotlight: Jonghwan Lee

Jonghwan Lee is an Assistant Professor of Engineering and an Assistant Professor of Brain Science. He leads a research group leelab.ai at the intersection of medical photonics, neural engineering, and artificial intelligence.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Lori Daiello

Lori Daiello spent the first decade of her career working as a clinical consultant pharmacist in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. She says observing the devastating effects of late-stage Alzheimer’s disease on patients and the prolonged suffering of their families and caregivers was the most impactful experience of her professional life.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Eve Glenn

Eve Glenn is on a mission to better understand addiction and to help create more effective treatments for alcohol and substance use disorders.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Ahmed Abdelfattah

For neuroscientist Ahmed Abdelfattah, brain science is simply exciting. He believes that with the right tools scientists can shine light on previously unknown brain processes, getting one step closer to demystifying brain function at cellular and network levels.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Priya Bhanot

Millions of people in the United States are suffering from substance use disorder. Approximately 60,000 people nationwide are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease each year. A Brown University undergraduate student is on a mission to understand the link between substance use disorder and Parkinson’s disease in an attempt to meet the country’s growing health care needs.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Oriel FeldmanHall

The Society for NeuroEconomics honored Oriel FeldmanHall, Manning Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, with their Early Career Award at the society’s virtual annual meeting in October.
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Community Spotlight: Sara Zeppilli

Sara Zeppilli first discovered neuroscience in her native Italy eight years ago. Now, she is a graduate student at Brown University and the first author of a study that lays the foundation for understanding the evolution of olfactory sensory processing across species.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Deborah Murphy

When the COVID-19 crisis sent Brown University’s staff, faculty and students home to facilitate social distancing, Deborah Murphy fired up her sewing machine and stitched more than 100 protective masks for family, friends and members of the Carney Institute for Brain Science community.
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Community Spotlight: Jason Ritt

Neuroscientist Jason Ritt is on a mission to assess the depth of brain science potential at Brown University, and to find ways to facilitate the sharing of ideas and methods across laboratories.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Judy Liu

Neurologist Judy Liu spends a good portion of her time caring for patients with severe neurological conditions. But when Liu steps into her lab at Brown University, she is particularly interested in a single condition: epilepsy.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: E. Javier López Soto

E. Javier López Soto, a postdoctoral research associate in Brown University’s Lipscombe Lab, was discussing an experiment with an undergraduate student in March when he received a long-awaited phone call from the Warren Alpert Foundation.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Monica Linden

It’s 11 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 21, when Monica Linden, a senior lecturer of neuroscience at Brown University, rings a bell and asks her students to close their eyes, take a deep breath and focus on their posture.
News from Carney

Community Spotlight: Kathleen Gerlach

Kathleen Gerlach left her brand new office at Sidney Frank Hall in 2010 to take on a new challenge at the then small, yet rapidly growing Brown Institute for Brain Science.