People

Ross earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 2015. He is currently an Advanced Fellow in Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC) at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System and Yale University. His research is focused on identifying neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms involved in the maintenance and treatment of addiction.

Shosuke was a full time research assistant in the CAN lab. He graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in Neuroscience in 2014. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at Emory University. 

Reuben was a full time research assistant in the CAN lab. He received his degree in cognitive science from Calhoun College at Yale in 2014. He is interested in the psychology of living well – how the mind assigns ethical and moral value and produces feelings of meaningfulness and fulfillment. He practices meditation and hopes to study its potential use in cultivating mental habits conducive to human flourishing.  He is also interested in how emotion regulation techniques may be skillfully implemented in light of heuristics for evaluating experience like the “ends-and-peaks” rule. 

Joe earned his MD and PhD in Neuroscience from the Medical University of South Carolina. Broadly, Joe’s research focuses on pairing brain stimulation techniques with brain imaging techniques in order to map and modulate the aberrant neural networks associated with refractory psychiatric and neurological symptoms.

Hailey is an Neuroscience major in Davenport College (class of 2020). As an undergraduate research assistant, she has worked on a meta-analysis that models how cue reactivity and craving affect treatment outcomes. Now, she is working on a study that examines the efficacy of brief training on ability to regulate craving and subsequent substance use. Broadly, Hailey is interested in neural mechanisms behind disorders and disabilities and intends on pursuing medical school.

Email: jessica.mollick@yale.edu

Jessica is interested in the brain mechanisms involved in learning and decision making, and the role that neuromodulatory systems such as dopamine play in these tasks. Her research focuses on computational neural network models of the basal ganglia, amygdala and dopamine system, with a particular focus on expanding those models to look at the role of dopamine and the basal ganglia in negative valence learning and understanding the brain mechanisms that drive prediction errors for worse than expected outcomes. She has applied these models to a variety of learning tasks. Her empirical research focuses on fMRI, using a conditioned inhibition experiment with juice rewards that draws on worse than expected prediction errors, and involves applying temporal-differences learning and neural network models to this experiment, as well as a pain learning task, to assess the fit of these different models to fMRI data in dopaminergic and subcortical regions. She is interested in comparing the fit of different models with empirical data, and looking at how evaluation of reward and punishment outcomes relates to addictive behaviors.

Email: rob.palmer@yale.edu

Rob is a medical student at Yale (class of 2021) who’s helping with the CAN Lab’s research on mindfulness and CBT interventions for craving regulation in people trying to reduce or quit smoking. He has previously contributed to research on ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT for the treatment of concerning opioid use as well as on research at the University of Southern California that involved fMRI and EEG imaging of long-term meditators. He hopes that he will–before he graduates from medical school–help conduct research that explores the effects of mindfulness interventions on implicit bias.

Taylor received her B.S. in Psychology from Yale (class of 2021) and is currently a master’s student at the Yale School of Public Health in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She has worked on a variety of projects at CANLab, including an ongoing clinical trial testing the efficacy of regulation of craving training on heavy drinking in young adults, as well as a meta-analysis examining the effects of negative emotions on eating and weight. Her research interests include neural mechanisms behind disordered and addictive behaviors, with specific focus on eating and substance use.

Audrey Edelman is a full-time Postgraduate Associate for both Dr. Hedy Kober’s Clinical & Affective Neuroscience Lab and Dr. Jutta Joormann’s Affect Regulation & Cognition Lab. Audrey graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Simmons University in 2019 and joined the CAN Lab in spring of 2021. She primarily works on coordinating an NIH-funded fMRI study which investigates the impact of maternal depression history on child emotion regulation. Her main research interests include child emotion regulation, risk factors for internalizing disorders, and psychopathology in the family context. Audrey hopes to go on to pursue a graduate degree in clinical psychology to continue studying these topics.

Jennifer is a junior in Trumbull College majoring in Cognitive Science on the pre-med track. She has previously contributed to research involving spinal cord injuries and neural regeneration. Her current research interests include craving regulation, substance use disorder interventions, mindfulness, and emotional regulation. 

Astra is a senior in Benjamin Franklin college majoring in Neuroscience on the pre-med track. She has previously contributed to research involving reward prediction errors in substance use disorders as well as the role of mindfulness interventions. Currently, she is working on her senior thesis project with the CAN lab looking at the neural correlates of wins and losses in individuals with substance use or gambling disorders.
Outside of the lab she enjoys dancing with Yaledancers and serves on the board of Black Pre Health at Yale.