Section on Cognitive Neuropsychology Staff

Alex Martin, Ph.D. | NIH Senior Investigator and Chief

Dr. Martin received his Ph.D. from the City University of New York.  He is Chief of the Cognitive Neuropsychology Section, focused on understanding the neural organization of human memory and social processing systems and how they breakdown in neuropsychiatric disorders. Dr. Martin is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association.

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Jason Avery, Ph.D. | Research Fellow

Dr. Avery received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from The University of Tulsa in 2013. He joined the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition in 2017 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His current research focuses on the neurobiology of taste perception and food-related cognition, and incorporates a combination of machine-learning methods, behavioral modeling, and high-field functional MRI.

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Jude Baffoe-Bonnie | Post-baccalaureate Fellow

Jude received his BS in Neuroscience from Temple University. His research involves examining hippocampal representations of coarse and detailed memory, as well as investigating the cortical layers that store long-term memories after consolidation.

Caroline Candy | Post-baccalaureate Fellow

Caroline graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience and a minor in business administration. She currently studies taste perception using fMRI. She is interested in studying the neural mechanisms underlying perception and memory in individuals with ASD and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Leonardo Claudino, Ph.D. | Staff Scientist

Leo holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland College Park (2016). Prior to joining the Section on Cognitive Neuropsychology as a Staff Scientist, Leo was a Postdoc at the Human Cortical Physiology and Neurorehabilitation Section (HCPS-NINDS) and a Staff Scientist at the Section of Neurobiology of Fear and Anxiety (SNFA-NIMH). He is interested in the neural and behavioral bases of perception, action, consolidation, motivation, and decision-making. Leo’s tools include, but are not limited to: MEG, tACS, crowdsourcing, computational modeling, signal processing and numerical optimization.

Stephen J. Gotts, Ph.D. | Senior Associate Scientist

Dr. Gotts received his B.A. from Trinity University (TX) in 1994 and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 in Cognitive Neuroscience (Psychology). Following postdoctoral fellowships at CMU (Dr. David Plaut) and NIMH (Dr. Robert Desimone and Dr. Alex Martin), he joined the Section on Cognitive Neuropsychology as a Staff Scientist in 2010.  Dr. Gotts’s research is aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie the processing and representation of long-term perceptual and conceptual knowledge in the brain, with a particular focus on mechanisms of inter-regional physiological interaction (functional connectivity) and neural oscillations. He uses behavioral, fMRI, and electrophysiological (ECoG,EEG,MEG) experiments and neural network modeling in order to formulate explicit theories about the relationship between brain and behavior.

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Cassie Levesque | Post-baccalaureate Fellow

Cassie graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a B.S. in Neurobiology. She currently works on a simultaneous fMRI and EEG project investigating the neural processing of repetition suppression and repetition priming. She is interested in studying consciousness, dreaming, and the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy.

Taylor Li | Post-baccalaureate Fellow

Taylor graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) with a BS in Biopsychology and a BA in Statistics & Data Science. Her research currently employs task-based high-field laminar fMRI to explore neural cognition.

Andrew Persichetti, Ph.D. | Research Fellow

Dr. Persichetti received his BA in Philosophy and Psychology from Portland State University and his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from Emory University. He joined the Lab of Brain and Cognition at NIMH in 2018. He primarily uses a combination of fMRI and behavioral measures in humans to study how perception, memory, and language systems contribute to the acquisition and representation of knowledge.

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