Communications Committee

Chair of the Communications Committee

Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology and the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, heading the Educational Neuroimaging Group (ENIG). She is also an Associate Professor (PAR) at Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Between the years 2013-2021, Dr. Horowitz-Kraus was appointed an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the College of Medicine, at the University of Cincinnati and the Scientific Director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center in the Department of General and Community Pediatrics at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. In her research, Dr. Horowitz-Kraus focuses on the involvement of executive functions during word reading and fluency as part of the Simple View of Reading model in typically and atypically developing children with reading difficulties. As reading difficulties may stem from environmental and genetic factors, Dr. Horowitz-Kraus’s approach examines the involvement of executive functions in reading acquisition and remediation using a nature-nurture perspective using a variety of neuroimaging techniques tools. Dr. Horowitz-Kraus joined the Flux Board in 2021.

I graduated in June of 2020 from the University of Oregon with honors in Psychology, minors in Special Education and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies. My research examines underlying mechanisms that may contribute to brain and behavioral trajectories variation, such as early life stress and pubertal processes during adolescence. Adolescence is a period of physiological, psychosocial, and neural shifts therefore I hope to translate my findings and develop more targeted ways to support this influential period of growth. I am currently working with Dr. Jennifer Pfeifer and Dr. Kate Mills at the University of Oregon. I will be entering the UCLA Developmental Psychology Ph.D. program to work with Dr. Jen Silvers in the fall. Outside of research, I enjoy running, being mediocre at knitting, and practicing yoga! My pronouns are she/her/hers. As someone relatively new to research and Flux, it is clear that communication, both interpersonal and scientific, accelerates us as a society and in the field of human brain development. Flux has been instrumental in my early development as a researcher. I cannot wait to pay it back by serving on the Communication Committee this year.

I started my PhD in September 2021 in the Lifespan Cognitive Dynamics Lab in Nijmegen under the supervision of Prof Rogier Kievit. I study how brain maturation (looking at white matter microstructure and grey matter morphology) underlies the development of cognitive ability in childhood and adolescence. I am more broadly interested in the effect of genetics and the environment on children’s development. Before this PhD, I completed my master’s degree in cognitive science in Paris with a major in neuroscience. During my master and my PhD, I have been part of several organizations aimed toward outreach (Cognivence, Federation Fresco, Pint of Science, Brain Olympiad). I joined the Flux Communication Committee at the end of 2022 to engage with the community and learn more about science communication.”

Hello, my name is Christina Lutz and I am currently a Neuroscience PhD candidate in the Developmental Neuroimaging Group headed by Prof. Silvia Brem at the University of Zurich. I have long been fascinated by the brain and its roles in health and disease – particularly in cognition, language, memory, sleep, and mood. My PhD project involved a big study with around 100 elementary school children with poor and typical reading skills. What especially attracted me to the project was the clinical and translational aspect. The study combines basic research (trying to better understand reading disorders) with the evaluation of a possible therapeutic application (an app-based reading training). Currently, I am evaluating and analyzing the results, focusing predominantly on electroencephalography (EEG). I very much look forward to contributing to the Flux Communications Committee. All my life, I’ve been intrigued with language(s), culture(s), and communication. I strongly believe that communication is an essential and integral part of science and our society as a whole. We have so much to gain from interacting and sharing knowledge and experience with each other, be it across different labs, disciplines, or countries. Therefore, I am excited to be joining this great initiative and team, to share knowledge and to promote exchange across borders.

Across the first decade of life, most children develop the ability to focus on a complex goal, such as coloring a picture or listening to a teacher recite the alphabet. My goal is to understand how children’s brains change as they develop this ability, and why some children find these goals especially challenging. To answer this broad question, my research focuses on two areas of interest. First, I use the visual system to test how different aspects of children’s visual environments influence their attention abilities. I have found that children’s attention depends on environmental features such as luminance, color, and motion. I have also found that the connection between brain regions that support vision and attention develop differently in autistic children compared to typically developing children. Second, I study how positive and negative experiences of both parents and children as well as the financial and educational resources within the home and across society shape brain development, how children think, and their academic achievement. My research shows that the experiences of both parents and children are related to how their children’s brain develop and their academic achievement. My future research will integrate these two research areas to test how parent’s and children’s shared and unique environments and experiences affect brain development and set the foundation for children’s academic achievement.

Hi everyone! I am a Neuroengineering and Medicine post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. In my current work with Dr. Ted Satterthwaite, I study the effects of early life experiences and environments on neurocognitive development. I completed my PhD in Neurosciences at Stanford University with Dr. Leanne Williams, where I investigated neuroimaging correlates of attention impairments in adults with psychiatric illness. During graduate school, I was co-president of NeuWrite West, a science communication organization bringing together an interdisciplinary group of writers and neuroscientists. I am thrilled to be joining the Flux Communications Committee because I believe communication is key to the success of our society, both in exchanging new ideas and in sharing our research findings. I look forward to working with this wonderful team and facilitating engagement within our community.

I study the neural architecture that supports the cognitive skills necessary to plan, initiate and execute one’s goals. I am particularly interested in how the increasing complexity of adolecence’s social world might bootstrap the development of such higher-order cognitive skills. The ultimate goal of my work centers around elucidating how the dynamic interplay between one’s social world and higher-order cognitive skills in adolescence might lead to differential outcomes in one’s neural architecture in adulthood. By better understanding the neural and environmental factors that might impact age-related changes in one’s neural architecture, I hope to inform early-life interventions that can target environmental factors and enhance life-outcomes.