Aaron is a clinical psychologist and affective neuroscientist who received his BA from UC Berkeley, his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and postdoctoral training at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is interested in better understanding the temporal dynamics of emotion and how they relate to individual differences in risk for psychopathology. He uses a variety of methods including brain imaging (fMRI), psychophysiological (facial EMG, skin conductance) and mobile Health to better understand these relationships.

Prior to attending UM, Lara pursued my undergraduate studies in Behavioral Biology, Psychology and French at Johns Hopkins University, and completed a post baccalaureate fellowship in the Genetic Epidemiology Branch at the National Institutes of Health. She is interested in integrating neuroimaging and ecological momentary assessment to discover how changes in the brain affect real-time emotional fluctuations in individuals with mood disorders.

Brittany graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Psychology. She then spent two years as a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her primary research interests lie in understanding the brain-based mechanisms that relate to the sustainment of positive and negative affect following personally-relevant stressors. She is also interested in applying different neuroimaging techniques (MRI, fMRI, and MRS) to elucidate the relationship between affective regulation and psychopathology.

Chiemeka completed his BA in psychology in 2015 at Harvard University, where he served as a research assistant in the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab. There, he worked under Dr. Leah Somerville helping to investigate how neural circuits associated with emotion and reward processing change over the course of adolescence. In his capacity as lab manager, Chiemeka has coordinated studies involving ecological momentary assessment, fMRI, and clinical assessments of mental disorder symptoms. He is interested in how affective science research can help us understand the experience of patients dealing with mental health challenges, and is pursuing a medical degree to continue working in support of various patient populations.

Bill is interested in better understanding how reward processing and affective regulation vary between healthy, depressed, and anxious individuals. Bill is also interested in improving psychophysiological methods and measures with the overall goal of understanding how stress reactivity differs across spectra of psychopathology. As a member of the MANATEE Lab, Bill is involved in processing and analysis of fMRI neuroimaging data and Ecological Momentary Analysis (EMA) data collection. In his spare time, Bill practices the trumpet and performs jazz around Miami.

Rick is a Computer Science and Psychology double major from St. Augustine, FL. He plans to attend graduate school and his research interests include brain-computer interfaces, affective neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and neurotheology.

Cate's research focuses on characterizing the development and dynamics of the learning, memory, and decision-making processes that shape our behavior. She uses a broad array of methodological approaches to examine the cognitive, computational, and neural processes that inform our choices and actions.

Kiara's primary focus lies in researching factors that play a role in the etiology, comorbidity, and maintenance of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders. She is particularly interested in translational factors and integrative risk models, including the role of stress, self-regulatory deficits, and emotional tolerance.