Renee Migliaccio
Renee is a doctoral student in Dr. Zemon's lab and has completed her internship training. Renee's research interests are related to visual assessment and contrast sensitivity in brain-injured individuals. She is currently involved in a collaborative project with the Lab for Visual Disease and Therapy at the Burke Neurological Institute under the direction of Dr. Zemon and Dr. Glen Prusky. Her work focuses on the use of visual evoked potentials to validate and clarify the mechanisms involved in a contrast sensitivity eye-tracking paradigm being developed by Dr. Prusky and his team. She is currently on internship at Jewish Child Care Association in the Bronx.
Stacey Lurie
Stacey's research interests include utilizing VEPs to better understand the biological underpinnings of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and related developmental disorders. Under the direction of both Dr. Zemon and Paige Siper, Ph.D. at the Seaver Autism Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, her pre-doctoral master's thesis assessed lateral interactions in the visual system in children with (ASD) as compared to typically developing controls. Stacey's dissertation assessed VEPs and behavioral sensory symptoms in three of the most common single-locus causes of ASD: Phelan McDermid syndrome, ADNP syndrome, and FOXP1 syndrome, as compared to individuals ASD without a known genetic cause (known as idiopathic ASD). Stacey competed her internship at Kings County Hospital: Child Track.
Clementina Lo Proto
Tina is in the class of 2018. She has a background working with adults diagnosed with a serious and persistent mental illness, homeless individuals, and those requiring crisis intervention and psychiatric evaluation and hospitalization. As part of Dr. Vance Zemon’s Systems Neuroscience Lab, she was interested in conducting research on visual evoked potentials in the fields of schizophrenia and traumatic brain injury.
Kasey Rothkopf
Kasey’s research interests involve exploring visual processing deficits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) through the use of VEPs. Kasey completed her predoctoral research project in collaboration with James Gordon, Ph.D. at Hunter College, City University of New York. For this project, she investigated whether presentation of radial-patterned stimuli, which elicit steady-state VEPs (ssVEPs), could be shortened in duration while still maintaining test integrity. The goal was to develop a method of stimulus presentation to be used when testing clinical populations who have difficulty sitting still and/or focusing for prolonged periods of time, such as young children with ASD. For her dissertation project, Kasey explored the relationship between VEPs and an individual’s performance on psychological screeners for ASD. Kasey is also interested in psychological interventions for individuals with ASD, and participates in clinical and research work in this area.
Sloane Sheldon
She is interested in neurological disorders, particularly traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). Sloane joined Dr. Zemon's lab in order to understand these disorders on the neurological level through the use of visual evoked potentials (VEPs). Her pre-doctoral master's project helped establish the reliability of some of these measures. Sloane's dissertation is investigating the relationships between neural functioning as measured by VEPs and neurocognitive functioning. Sloane has completed her internship in neuropsychology at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and is currently completing her post-doctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at Columbia.
Margaret Vincent
Maggie’s research interests include cognitive and perceptual impairment in schizophrenia and the remediation of such deficits. For her dissertation project, Maggie expanded upon her pre-doctoral research investigating the structural and functional correlates of visual processing dysfunction in schizophrenia with the goal of better understanding the underlying neurophysiological substrates of such deficits. Specifically, she utilized ophthalmologic and electrophysiological methods to assess the integrity of the retina and visual pathway in patients with schizophrenia, in conjunction with basic and higher-level visual perceptual measures.
Amina Benkhoukha
She received a public health certification while conducting international research in Hyderabad, India, while collecting data for her pre-doctoral dissertation, which was titled "Gender differences in school-based health education, parental support, and health behaviors, and predictors of health behaviors among adolescents in Hyderabad, India". Her dissertation investigated the effects and interaction of pre- and post-immigration trauma and adversity on health-seeking behaviors in first generation Middle Eastern immigrants. Amina completed her internship at the United Nations, more specifically the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS). She is also the research coordinator on a grant funded project that assesses the effects of Transcendental Meditation on symptoms of PTSD in military veterans.
Anthony Santoro
Anthony's interests included examining social determinants of physical and mental health and the ways in which adversity faced during development impacts health in adulthood. His research focused on exploring the ways in which cultural belief systems (e.g., religion/spirituality) can serve as a protective factor against the deleterious health effects of adversity and disadvantage. Clinically, he is drawn to working with low-SES populations with co-morbid medical illness, cognitive deficients, and functional disabilities.
Victor DelBene
Victor's graduate research focused on the cortical dynamics and timing of interhemispheric transfer in high-functioning children and adolescents on the autism spectrum. To achieve this, he used high-density EEG, psychophysics, and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) at both a basic and translational level. This work was in collaboration with John J. Foxe, Ph.D. (University of Rochester & Albert Einstein College of Medicine) in the cognitive neurophysiology laboratory (CNL). At the CNL, Victor was also involved in other EEG and MRI studies in autism and schizophrenia. Additional research interests include multisensory integration, sensory habituation, violence in schizophrenia, and the combination of genetics and neuroimaging.
For additional information visit Victor's researchgate profile.
Rachel Reich
Rachel's research interests lie in the area of severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI). Her Master’s thesis investigated emotion processing in schizophrenia. More specifically, she worked to develop a multi-dimensional scaling model of facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia. Her dissertation research also concerned SPMI, and looks at neurobiological correlates of suicide among patients with bipolar disorder. In this capacity, she performed clinical interviews as well as coordinated fMRIs, and worked in collaboration with Dr. Phillip Szeszko at The Feinstein Institute (North Shore- Long Island Jewish Medical Center) in addition to Dr. Zemon. Ultimately, she hopes to be able to significantly contribute to the field of bipolar research as well as suicidality research by looking for ways to predict high-risk behavior within this population.
Shaynna Herrera
Shaynna's research investigated visual processing deficits in schizophrenia through the use of VEPs. In collaboration with Pamela Butler, PhD at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, her predoctoral research project investigated contrast processing deficits in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder using steady-state VEPs (ssVEPs) and a psychophysical contrast sensitivity task. Her dissertation built upon this work by exploring the contribution of low-level visual processing dysfunction to higher level processes in schizophrenia, such as poor facial emotion recognition, cognition, and functional outcomes. This research utilized a novel visual stimulus condition to elicit ssVEPs - hexagonal arrays of isolated dots - which may improve assessment of visual functionality and mechanisms of interest. She is also interested in psychological treatments for psychosis and participates in clinical and research work in this area. Shaynna is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters VA Medical Center.
Yu-Ting Tsai
Yu-Ting is interested in patients with schizophrenia and their ability of emotion recognization. Yu-Ting's master’s thesis adopted a new frequency technique to analyze VEPs to examine the neurophysiological substrates of patients’ deficits in visual function and investigate whether that was associated with their emotion recognition ability. Expanding on this work, her dissertation examined patients’ cognitive functions. She anticipated that the findings will elucidate the intertwined relationships between emotion recognition, visual processes, and cognitive functions in patients with schizophrenia.
Casara Jean Ferretti
Casara Jean Ferretti's research is focused on recognizing the ASD advantage using strengths in visual processing abilities, in addition to identifying electrophysiological and immunological biomarkers and endophenotypes. Ms. Ferretti was a psychometrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Spectrum Neuroscience and Treatment Institute. She is also an established grant writer, and has helped to secure multiple federal and foundation grants to further the study of novel therapeutics for those with ASD. Ms. Ferretti has multiple publications, book chapters and presentations on ASD and related fields, including a chapter in the 2015 World Psychiatric Association’s Immunology and Psychiatry textbook, and one in the 2018 APPI book Autism Spectrum Disorders. She is also an abstract reviewer for the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) and a peer reviewer for Autism Research.
Chloe Ifrah
Chloe’s research interests involve exploring electrophysiological biomarkers for at risk schizophrenia patients through the use of VEPS. Under the direction of Dr. Zemon and Dr. Molholm in the Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, her current pre-doctoral masters thesis looked at 22q11.2 deletion syndrome patients who are at risk for schizophrenia and comparing them to typically developing adults using basic visual processing paradigms. Her dissertation project, under the direction of Dr. Zemon and Dr. Herrera at Mount Sinai, involves comparing contrast sensitivity among those at chronic high risk for psychosis, those with schizophrenia and neurotypical controls. Chloe is also currently a clinical and cognitive rater for a schizophrenia study at Mount Sinai which focuses on exercise and cognition. Additionally, Chloe was Dr. Zemon's Lab TA from 2019 to Spring 2021.
Sarah Mandelbaum
Sarah’s research interests involve visual assessment and contrast sensitivity in brain-injured children through the use of VEPs. Under the direction of Dr. Zemon and Dr. Glen Prusky in the Laboratory for Visual Disease and Therapy at Burke Neurological Institute, her current pre-doc project is validating and clarifying the mechanisms involved in a contrast sensitivity eye-tracking paradigm being developed by Dr. Prusky and his team.
Benjamin Langstein
Ben Langstein is a fifth year student in Dr. Zemon's lab. Ben's research focuses on the intersection between religion and psychology. Under the direction of Dr. Zemon and Dr. Ronis-Tobin, his pre-doctoral project examines the relationship between religious attendance and engagement in risky behaviors such as substance use and aggression in a statewide sample of grade school students.
