Communications Committee

Jessica is a professor of psychology and faculty ombudsperson at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, USA. She runs the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience lab and studies the development of control in brain and behavior and how it relates to academic performance and mental health in middle childhood through late adolescence.

I am a PhD candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Education currently working with Drs. Jason Yeatman and Phil Fisher. My research uses longitudinal neuroimaging methods to understand the developmental trajectories of gray and white matter in early childhood, particularly in diverse and underserved populations, and examine how neural development relates to educational and other well-being outcomes.

Beyond improving interventions for children, I aim to bridge science and practice while communicating findings accessibly to broad audiences—researchers and laypeople alike—so this research can directly impact lives globally, not just in Western societies.

Hello, my name is Qin. I am currently a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University in Canada. My research focuses on using fMRI multivariate methods to investigate social cognition and brain development in children and adolescents.

I am interested in how developmental neuroscience can be communicated to broader audiences and wish to serve as a bridge between scientific research and the public. I am happy to connect with others in the FLUX community, engage in meaningful outreach and communication activities, further develop my communication skills, and contribute to the society.

I am a PhD student in Stanford Graduate School of Education’s Developmental and Psychological Sciences program where I study reading development, executive functioning, and equitable assessment. I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Psychology and Criminology where I was first introduced to research. My work spans the areas of education, neuroscience, psychology, and criminology and is heavily shaped by my background as a first generation low-income scholar. I am passionate about advancing how research captures and supports the strengths of historically underserved communities through community-grounded science.

I am a doctoral candidate in the Educational Neuroscience program at Vanderbilt University, working with Dr. Laurie Cutting (and many additional wonderful colleagues!) in the Education & Brain Sciences Research Lab. My research interests lie in the development of white matter microstructure (the "highways" of brain signal transmission) and its role in academic performance in children. More specifically, I am particularly fascinated by relationships between white matter microstructure and concurrent/future performance and intervention in reading and math, and changes in both.

I truly hope that my work will inform educational practice and policy in both the diagnosis and treatment of learning difficulties. I am so excited to be part of the flux communications committee, to help disseminate the amazing research that our incredible developmental cognitive neuroscience community is conducting, to ultimately try to effect widespread positive change — and make the world a better place!

Jamie is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Education’s Developmental and Psychological Sciences program at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Education Sciences from the University of California, Irvine, focusing on developmental psychology. Her current research interests focus on understanding the relationship between behavioral measures of reading ability and neural mechanisms of reading. She’s particularly interested in uncovering neural profiles of dyslexia and how these profiles relate to different behavioral profiles of dyslexia. Jamie is also interested in understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie the processing of visual forms of language in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals.

Dr. Giorgia Picci directs the Cognitive Affective Neurodevelopment in Youth (CANDY) Lab in the Institute for Human Neuroscience at Boys Town National Research Hospital. Her lab is broadly interested in how different dimensions of early life adversity and neurodevelopmental disorders (i.e., autism) shape brain development, puberty, and mental health outcomes. Her work integrates multiple levels of biology through hormonal assessments and cutting-edge neuroimaging modalities to measure neurodevelopment, including structural and functional MRI as well as magnetoencephalography (MEG). Through this more comprehensive approach to quantifying variability in neurodevelopment, her lab hopes to advance the field’s understanding of how specific dimensions of one’s biology and environment during development impact risk for psychopathology and adaptation to life.

I am a doctoral student in the Psychology, Cognition and Neuroscience program at Temple University. My research interrogates neural, psychosocial, and developmental mechanisms of externalizing and internalizing behaviors with novel social feedback fMRI tasks. I have a particular interest in constructs such as threat sensitive brain function, memory bias, contextual unpredictability, and puberty. Lived experiences consistently inspire theory in the field of social neuroscience. As such, it is my ardent belief that scientists must act as the bridge between the results of our work and everyday people.

I am Subhasri Viswanathan, a PhD Candidate in Neuroscience at the University of Montreal. My research integrates multimodal neuroimaging with graph theory–based network analysis to study how large-scale brain networks develop during adolescence and how substance use disrupts these developmental trajectories. I have presented my work at the Flux Congress in 2023 and 2024, and I am delighted to now serve on the Flux Communications Committee. I am committed to interdisciplinary, collaborative science and to communicating research in ways that advance understanding of adolescent neurodevelopment and support youth mental health and prevention efforts.