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

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

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 Tran, Ph.D.

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 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

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 Psychology Ph.D. student in the Wagner Lab. He is interested in the neural mechanisms governing selective encoding and retrieval of episodic memories. He aims to understand the role of goal and attentional states on selective memory for competing important information in younger and older adults. His work leverages computational modeling approaches and multivariate statistical methods to analyze behavioral and neural data. Shawn’s prior training in computational macroevolutionary biology inspires him to consider novel implementations of high-throughput, big data approaches to ask and answer neurobiological questions with basic science and translational aims.

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

Gloria Cheng

Gloria Cheng (B.S. ’23, University of California, Irvine) is a research coordinator in the Wagner lab. Her undergraduate honors thesis explored the effects of time on the retrieval and influence of episodic memory on future decisions. She strives to study the intricate role of memory and neurobiology in shaping goal-directed behavior, particularly within the context of healthy aging.

Khanh K. Nguyen

Khanh Nguyen (B.S. '22, UT Austin) is a research coordinator in the Wagner lab. At UT Austin, she conducted research in Dr. Alison Preston's lab, studying how episodic memory processes are affected by emotion. Her honors thesis investigated how overnight consolidation impact emotional influences on associative memory. She aims to study the underlying mechanisms of memory encoding and retrieval in young and healthy aging adults. 

Jen Park

Jen (B.A. '19, University of Southern California) is a Clinical Research Coordinator Associate in both the Mormino and Wagner Labs. Before coming to Stanford, Jen worked at UC Davis at the Cognitive Electrophysiology and Neuroimaging Lab that seeks to develop methods sensitive to cognitive impairments of neurodegenerative diseases, and then was most recently working on the KHANDLE study that looks to shed light on racial & ethnic differences in aging, cognitive decline and dementia incidence. Jen's research interests are in the early detection of Alzheimer's Disease & other neurodegenerative diseases and in better understanding changes that occur in the brain in aging and preclinical AD. 

America Romero

America Romero (B.S. '21, Cal Poly SLO) is a research coordinator in both the Mormino and Wagner labs. At Cal Poly, she conducted research in Dr. Kelly Bennion’s lab, studying retroactive interference and facilitation in learning and memory. America’s senior thesis investigated how attention affects emotional false memory. America’s research interests include investigating factors that predict memory performance using neuroimaging and behavioral methods.