Hongji Kim, Postdoc Researcher

Hongji earned her BS in Biological Sciences, BA in Psychology, and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) in South Korea. During graduate school, she studied the neural basis of human emotion and spontaneous thought using fMRI-based predictive modeling. Her research focuses on understanding the dynamic interplay between emotion, mental health, and social interaction. Outside the lab, she enjoys music, movies, playing squash, and watching cute animal videos.

Amisha Vyas, PhD student

Amisha studies the social interactive mechanisms that underlie our ability to get on the same page as others and connect with them. Her research combines computational and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods to understand these processes in the brain and behavior. Prior to joining Columbia, she was a Lab Manager at Dartmouth College, where she studied mental state representation and naturalistic social interactions with Prof. Mark Thornton.

Miriam Schwyck, Postdoc Researcher

Miriam earned her B.A. from Bethel College, KS and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Between undergraduate and graduate school, she spent time working in immigration law, then as a lab manager at Rutgers University and Princeton University. Broadly, her research uses methods and analyses from different fields to examine the structure of social knowledge and how it relates to one’s ability to thrive in social settings. Specifically, she is interested in how humans track and use information about their dynamic relationships, and how real-world social networks shape how we think about others and ourselves. Beyond research, Miriam enjoys camping, making ceramics, and drinking the perfect cup of tea.

Kaitlyn Mundy, PhD Student

Kaitlyn graduated from Brown University with a BS in Cognitive Neuroscience. She’s interested in what makes us feel connected to others, individual difference in interpretation and recall of social information, and the formation and updating of predictions of others' behaviors and beliefs. Outside of the lab, she enjoys concerts, crafting, and wandering the city in search of green spaces and good food.

Courtney Jimenez, PhD Student

Courtney attended UC Davis and graduated with a BS in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior and a BA in Psychology.  Courtney is interested in investigating the neural and cognitive mechanisms of social learning and memory using neuroimaging and computational methods. In her free time, she likes being outside, making people laugh, and learning new things!

Danika Geisler, PhD Student

Danika completed a BS in Cognitive Science and a BS in Informatics at Indiana University. While at Indiana University she completed an honors thesis investigating early facial processing in Aina Puce’s Social Neuroscience Lab. After graduating Danika worked as an IT Analyst for Eli Lilly and Co. Currently, she is interested in the role of the default network in social priming. Outside of the lab Danika enjoys hiking, board games, and reading.

Dhaval Bhatt, PhD Student

Dhaval received his BE in Electronics Engineering from BITS-Pilani (Goa, India) and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he worked as a signal processing engineer at Michael Platt’s lab, thereby broadening his interest from tools in engineering to applications in Neuroscience. Currently, his interest broadly covers imaging methods, rs-fMRI, information propagation models, graph theory, and social cognition. He enjoys puzzles, theatre, books, and coffee. If provided an open floor with groovy music, he doesn’t hesitate to shake a leg.

Era Wu, PhD Student

Era completed her BA in Sociology with minors in Philosophy and Psychology. After college, she worked at Rebecca Saxe’s lab as a lab manager. Now she is lucky enough to be in both CSNL (Columbia) and PhilLab (Dartmouth) to pursue her interest in moral psychology, decision making, social cognition, and causal reasoning. More specifically, she wants to explore people’s moral perceptions about collective agents and how these perceptions play out on the neural level. Outside of work, she enjoys reading, watching comedy shows, and sleeping.