Members
Director
Anthony D. Wagner, Ph.D.
Wagner (PhD '97, Stanford) is a Lucie Stern Professor in the Department of Psychology and a deputy director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. He has served on the board of Stanford's Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and is a faculty affiliate of the Symbolic Systems Program, Human Biology Program, and Stanford Center on Longevity. His basic science focuses on the psychology and neurobiology of learning, memory, and executive function in young and older adults. His translational research examines aging and Alzheimer's disease, the relationship between multitasking and cognition, and the implications of neuroscience for law.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Mingjian He, Ph.D.
Mingjian (Alex) (PhD ’24, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Purdon lab under the Department of Anesthesiology and in the Wagner lab under the Department of Psychology. He is passionate about combining statistics, electrophysiology and neuroimaging tools, and cognitive neuroscience experiments to understand cognitive decline in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. His research focuses on quantifying neural oscillations and investigates how the brain responds to memory decline with cognitive control and neuromodulatory systems. He is a part of the Awake EEG and Aging Study (AEAS) and the Sleep and Aging Study (SAS).
Subbulakshmi S, Ph.D.
Subbulakshmi (PhD’22, University of Cambridge) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wagner Lab. She is a NMOL 2022 Fellow at the Stanford Centre on Longevity. She is interested in understanding how cognitive systems like memory, attention, learning, decision making, emotional regulation and cognitive control interact with one another to bring about goal-directed behavior across the life-span. She is also broadly interested in understanding broader socio-political contexts and perspectives when studying human behavior and mental health. Her postdoctoral work will focus on studying underlying mechanisms of attention, memory and learning, and investigating how these mechanisms change as people age. Her work will leverage various cognitive neuroscience techniques including behavioral methods, functional MRI, structural MRI and PET imaging.
Jintao Sheng, Ph.D.
Jintao (PhD ’22, Beijing Normal University) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wagner Lab. She is broadly interested in what shapes human episodic memory and how memory declines with normal aging. As part of the Stanford Aging and Memory Study, her postdoctoral research will focus on how hippocampal functions (e.g., pattern separation) impact age-related memory decline by combining univariate and multivariate analysis. She plans to use a multimodal neuroimaging design, such as using an ultra-high resolution of structural MRI to segment the subfields of the hippocampus, functional MRI to measure brain activation and pattern separation, and PET to measure tau and amyloid-beta pathology, to understand the underlying neural mechanisms of memory decline.
Ali Trelle, Ph.D.
Ali (PhD '16, Cambridge) is an Instructor in the Stanford School of Medicine. Ali collaborates with the Wagner Lab on the Stanford Aging and Memory Study, a longitudinal multimodal biomarker study of human aging. Her research uses genetic, biofluid, and imaging markers of Alzheimer's disease to characterize the impact of early AD pathological changes on memory function in aging. Ali's research is supported by a K99 Pathway to Independence award from the National Institute on Aging.
Haopei Yang, Ph.D.
Haopei (H.Y.) (PhD ’22, Western University) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Wagner Lab. He is interested in how attentional mechanisms and goal-state coding interact to affect memory, as well as how these relationships change with age. His research involves EEG, pupillometry, structural and functional MRI as part of the Attention, Memory, and Aging Study at Stanford (AMASS).
Graduate Students
Douglas Miller
Douglas (B.A. ’17 UC Davis) is a Psychology PhD student in the Wagner Lab. He is interested in understanding how attentional states affect learning and subsequent memory strength. His work leverages a combination of behavioral, and neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods.
Shawn Schwartz, M.S., M.A.
Shawn (B.S. ’19, M.S. ’21, UCLA; M.A. '23, Stanford) is a PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford Psychology. His research leverages multimodal neuroimaging – fMRI, PET/MR, scalp EEG, and pupillometry - to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying fluctuations in attention and episodic memory. As a researcher on AMASS, he is specifically interested in how group and individual differences in molecular and structural biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease pathology relate to variance in moment-to-moment fluctuations in sustained attention and goal-state representation when attempting to bring a memory back to mind. He is funded by Stanford Psychology, the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at the Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and an Agility Project Grant from the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance.
Alice Xue
Alice (BA ’20, Columbia) is broadly interested in understanding how our experiences shape our understanding of the world and in turn, the decisions that we make. As a PhD student in the Wagner lab, she is studying the cognitive neuroscience of learning and memory, with a focus on the temporal characteristics of neural processes governing episodic encoding and retrieval. Alice’s research is supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Research Staff
Lucah Medina Guerra
Lucah (M.S. ’24, University of Southern California) is a Clinical Research Coordinator Associate in both the Mormino and Wagner Labs. At USC, he volunteered in the Braskie Research Group, where he worked with the Amyloid and Tau PET scans for the HABS-HD study. Lucah joined the Mormino and Wagner Labs in June 2024 to expand his knowledge in neurodegenerative diseases and ways to improve their early detection using neuroimaging tools, while working on the Stanford Aging and Memory Study.
Isha Sai
Isha (B.S. ‘23, UCLA) is a Clinical Research Coordinator Associate in both the Mormino and Wagner Labs. At UCLA, she conducted research at the UCLA Brain Mapping center under Dr. Shantanu Joshi. Isha’s senior thesis investigated brain abnormalities and neuropsychiatric correlates in Long COVID (PASC) using structural MRI. Isha joined the Mormino and Wagner laboratories in September 2023 and is looking forward to deepening her interests of neuroimaging and the early detection of AD while working on the Stanford Aging and Memory Study.
Tyler J. Ward
Tyler (B.S. ’19, University of California, Santa Cruz) is a Research Coordinator in the Memory Lab. His undergraduate studies focused on modeling high-level cognitive systems and biopsychosocial data science. He was a Research Associate for U.C. Berkeley under Dr. Susan Landau working on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and U.S. POINTER Imaging, developing expertise in quantifying amyloid and tau PET imaging. He then transitioned to clinical work for a year, treating patients under the supervision of psychiatrists with transcranial magnetic stimulation and monitoring ketamine therapy sessions for treatment-resistant depression. His goal in joining the Stanford Memory Lab is to study psychometrics and further his education in Alzheimer’s disease and the administrative side of research.