Sepideh Sadaghiani, Ph.D.Principal Investigator Sepideh Sadaghiani is Associate Professor of Psychology (Cognitive Neuroscience program area) and Bioengineering, and faculty of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She directs the CONNECTlab at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology where she is full-time faculty. Sadaghiani received a Ph.D. in Neural and Behavioral Sciences from the Max Planck Graduate School and postdoctoral training at Berkeley and Stanford. She investigates the role of neural connectivity and spontaneous brain activity in cognitive control and behavior through a multi-modal lens. Sadaghiani serves as handling editor at Imaging Neuroscience (formerly NeuroImage), Brain Topography, and Network Neuroscience. She has been recognized as National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awardee, Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar and Helen Corley Petit Scholar. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), and the NSF. |
Staff |
Thomas Alderson, Ph.D.Postdoctoral Research Associate
Thomas Alderson holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Ulster University, an M.Sc. in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Manchester, and an M.Sc. in Neuroinformatics from Newcastle University. His research is focused on whole-brain computer modelling and fusion of multimodal imaging such as concurrent EEG-fMRI and diffusion MRI to better understand the dynamic and static properties of whole brain networks in healthy and clinical populations.
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Samar ElSayed, M.Sc.Lab Manager Samar ElSayed holds a M.Sc. degree in Mental health from Zagazig University Egypt. During her master’s she did an internship at Humboldt University of Berlin as a graduate student travel award. She studied Biological sciences in her Bachelor’s degree followed by two graduate diplomas in Psychology and Mental health respectively. She is currently interested in spontaneous brain activity and the endogenously driven preparatory control. |
Graduate Students |
Parham MostameCognitive Neuroscience Ph.D. Candidate Parham Mostame joined the lab on Fall 2018 as a Ph.D. student in the cognitive neuroscience area of the psychology program. He has received his B.Sc. degree at the University of Tehran in electrical engineering in control division. He completed his M.Sc. degree at the same university in electrical engineering in the biomedical engineering division. During his M.Sc., He worked with ECoG signals acquired from epileptic patients to figure out the dynamics of high gamma functional connectivity during various linguistic tasks such as verb generation and word recognition. |
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Suhnyoung JunCognitive Neuroscience Ph.D. Candidate Suhnyoung Jun received her M.A. in psychology from Yonsei University and worked as a senior researcher at Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Decision-making Lab and Integrative Neurocognitive Functional Imaging Center. Her research interest mainly concerns the neural mechanisms associated with disorders that may disturb the processing of high-level cognition and emotion and integration of a variety of neural aspects and related affective-cognitive functions, by adopting a wide range of assessment tools and methodological strategies. Suhnyoung joined the lab in fall 2019. She is currently working on the data analysis of Zika’s project. |
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Chris PerrielloClinical Neuroscience Ph.D. Candidate Chris Perriello was born and raised in Boston, MA, completing a BS in Clinical Psychology at Tufts University before becoming involved in research studies at MGH and McLean Hospital. Currently, Chris is a second year in the clinical psychology program and is primarily interested in studying the neural mechanisms of transdiagnostic repetitive negative thinking (RNT) in anxious/depressed populations and the effects of RNT on executive functioning. |
Martín IraniNeuroscience Graduate Student Martín Irani obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from Universidad de Chile. Before joining the lab in 2021, he worked as a technical associate at the Interdisciplinary Center of Neuroscience in Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Martín is interested in the dynamic organization of meso- and large-scale networks that support core cognitive processes, such as inference, attention and perception. |
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Sarah OlshanCognitive Neuroscience Graduate Student Sarah Olshan completed her B.S. degree at the University of Florida in psychology with behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. Her main interests include a better understanding of how emotion is represented in the brain as well as how emotion and cognition interact using various brain imaging techniques (fMRI, EEG). In addition to better understanding these processes in healthy adults, she is interested in how emotional wellbeing can be fostered particularly for those with affective conditions such as anxiety and depression. |
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Leykza Carreras-SimonsCognitive Neuroscience Graduate Student Leykza Carreras-Simons received her B.A. in psychology from St. Olaf College. Before joining the lab in 2023, she was a full-time lab manager and research assistant at UW-Madison, where she worked on various projects within behavioral neuroendocrinology investigating neuroendocrine and epigenetic interactions predicting social behavior, development and play in rodents. She is interested in the mechanisms that may instigate reconfigurations in functional connectivity over time and from experience in connectome states, and how intrinsic connectivity networks may interact to affect subsequent behaviors and cognitive control. |
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