Brain, Mind, and Behavior

Dr. Weizhen Xie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Brain and Behavior Institute. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Renmin University of China and pursued research training at the University of California, Davis, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then completed his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, where he studied the neurocognitive mechanism of visual short-term memory precision. Following his Ph.D., Dr.

Dr. Desiree (Desi) Jones is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the SHINE Lab (Stigma, Human Interaction, and Neurodivergent Experiences) at the University of Maryland. Her research explores how autistic and non-autistic people understand and interact with one another, with a focus on stigma, identity, and masking in social interactions. She often centers the experiences of autistic people from underrepresented groups and uses both experimental and qualitative methods in her work. Dr.

Caroline Charpentier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and the Brain and Behavior Institute. She obtained her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, UK, with her dissertation focusing on the interaction between emotions and decision-making. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, studying the behavioral, neural, and computational mechanisms of social learning and decision-making.

I am a Lecturer in the Social Data Science Major and Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland. Go Terps! Previously, I earned my Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology and MS in Applied Statistics from The Ohio State University in 2023 where I studied mediation (indirect effects), moderation (conditional effects), dyadic data analysis, resampling methods, statistical power analysis, and data visualization. I have held numerous positions in industry and academia that have given me a unique approach to and view of research methods and statistics.

Dr. Ethan Mereish is an Associate Professor and the director of the Lavender Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's also an Adjunct Associate Professor at American University and Brown University. He completed his doctoral training at Boston College, a clinical psychology residency at Harvard Medical School, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University.

Dr. Navarro earned her Ph.D. at the University of Granada, Spain, and performed her doctoral research as a visiting scholar at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. Upon graduation, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurology at UCSF, and a visiting scholar at the Hellen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the human brain with the use of neuroscience techniques such as electroencephalography and fMRI.

Dr. Fanita Tyrell is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park.  Dr. Tyrell received her PhD in Developmental Psychology, with a minor in quantitative methods at the University of California, Riverside.  Following her doctoral training, she completed postdoctoral fellowships at the National Center for PTSD and the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. 

Dr. Gard is an Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology, Faculty Affiliate in the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience (NACS), Social Data Science Center, and the Maryland Population Research Center, and Director of the Growth And Resilience across Development (GARD) Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. Amanda Chicoli is a lecturer in the Psychology Department. She is also the research coordinator for the neuroscience major, a faculty advisor for the minor in neuroscience, and the course director for NEUR305: Neural Systems and Circuits. Previously, she earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science from the University of Maryland where she used behavioral and computational approaches to study collective behavior and decision making in groups of fish.