Team

Sepideh Sadaghiani is leading the CONNECTlab. She is Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, full-time faculty at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and faculty of the Neuroscience Program.She is a Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

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CV pdf

Staff

Graduate Students

Max Egan received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a full-time research coordinator at Shaw/Carmichael lab at Stanford since 2013. Max joins the lab as a Ph.D. student during fall 2016.

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.

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.

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.

Undergraduate Students

Sunaina Karanth is an undergraduate majoring in psychology with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience. She joined the CONNECT lab fall of 2017 and is currently assisting graduate student Max Egan on an EEG/fMRI project.

Junning Liang is an undergraduate psychology student with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience. She joined the lab in fall 2019 and is currently assisting Max and Chris in cleaning data.

Alumni

Jonathan Wirsich holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Aix-Marseille University and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research is focused on information integration 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 (epilepsy, stroke). Jonathan joined the CONNECT Lab in winter 2016. He is now working on concurrent EEG-fMRI at University of Geneva.

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Research Gate

Richard O. Bidó-Medina received his ‘Doctor of Medicine’ (M.D.) degree from Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He joined the Neuroscience Program of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Fall 2014, when he obtained the Fulbright Scholarship of the USA Department of State. His research interests are related to understanding the neural correlates of neurological and psychiatric disorders by utilizing neuroimaging techniques in order to improve their diagnosis and treatment. He is now working as a psychiatric resident at Harvard-MGH.

Ezra Winter-Nelson is a Psychology student involved in data acquisition in the lab.

Edwin Guzman is a clinical psychology student involved in clinical assessment, SCID-5 administration, and website management. His clinical assessment and SCID-5 involvement entail clinical outcome analysis and evaluation. Edwin’s website management involves HTML editing to update website content.

Lija Hoffman is an undergraduate psychology student on the pre-med track. She is interested in cognitive neuroscience, particularly the neural mechanisms of emotional regulation. She is a research assistant working under Max Egan and aids in EEG procedure.

Coleen Long is a clinical psychology student interested in further understanding psychiatric disorders and their various treatments. Her involvement in the lab includes coordinating research logistics for a clinical study, collecting clinical data, and assisting with EEG procedures.

Brian McFarlin is currently studying psychology with a concentration in cognitive neuroscience. He is interested in studying neurological disorders and their impact on an individual’s daily life. His responsibilities in the lab consist of EEG administration and behavioral data analysis.

Becca McWilliams is an undergraduate student pursuing a major in psychology with a neuroscience emphasis. She joined the CONNECT lab in Fall 2017. Currently, she is a research assistant working alongside Max Egan, assisting with EEG/fMRI procedure.

While at UIUC, Jessica Diaz studied psychology with a concentration in behavioral neuroscience. She is interested in psychiatric disorders, and the clinical applications of research on the treatment of these disorders. Jessica was involved in coordinating research logistics for a clinical study, as well as assistance with EEG and fMRI procedures.

Jorge Maldonado is a student from Carolina, Puerto Rico in the Neuroscience Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jorge received his B.S. in Biotechnology from Universidad del Este. His interests are to comprehend neurological and psychiatric disorders through the physical and functional brain states that characterize these disorders. He is dedicated to employing non-invasive techniques such as MRI to perform connectivity and morphometric analysis.

Paul McGrath joined our lab as a visiting student from Germany where he was enrolled in Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück. In our lab, Paul successfully completed his bachelor thesis investigating oscillatory mechanisms of cognitive control.

While at UIUC, Laura Pritschet studied Psychology with a particular focus in behavioral neuroscience. She is interested in traumatic brain injury research and the impact damaged areas have on functions of executive control. After leaving our lab, Laura joined the graduate program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.