Members

Natalie (PhD ’24, Columbia University) is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Wagner Lab and a 2024 New Map of Life Fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Natalie is interested in the different ways in which memory affects, and is affected by, decisions. In her Ph.D, Natalie studied how people evaluate options in the lack of direct experience; for example, how they remember and track the value of their unchosen options.
Her postdoc research focuses on how older adults, who often present impairments in associative memory, make decisions and evaluate them. More specifically, Natalie’s research aims to shed light on the neural correlates of regret and counterfactual valuation by combining behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, computational modeling, and biomarker analysis.

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 (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 (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.

Tammy (PhD ’19, Johns Hopkins) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wagner Lab. Her research focuses on examining the neural mechanisms underlying memory encoding in young adults and how these processes may change in aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Tammy’s work leverages virtual navigation to explore how memory and spatial navigation are intertwined. As part of the Stanford Aging and Memory study, she investigates how structural changes are related to biofluid and imaging biomarkers of disease. Tammy is funded by both an NIA F32 and an Alzheimer’s Association Research Fellowship to promote Diversity.

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 (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).