Kaplan, Jonas
Associate Professor of Psychology
I study self, consciousness, and meaning-making in all of its forms, with a focus on understanding the neural systems that integrate information to form high level models of the world and of the self. This includes a focus on narrative cognition, and naturalistic fMRI methods that allow for the analysis of the real-time, ongoing neural dynamics that support our understanding of the people, events, and stories that make up our worlds.
Schier, Lindsey
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
The Schier lab seeks to understand how the chemical constituents of foods and fluids are sensed, how these oral and postoral signals are processed in the brain and channeled into the behavioral outputs that subserve energy balance.
Shera, Christopher
Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
The peripheral auditory system transforms air-borne pressure waves into neural impulses that are interpreted by the brain as sound and speech. The cochlea of the inner ear is a snail-shaped electro-hydromechanical signal amplifier, frequency analyzer, and transducer with an astounding constellation of performance characteristics, including sensitivity to sub-atomic displacements with microsecond mechanical response times; wideband operation spanning three orders-of magnitude in frequency; and an input dynamic range of 120 dB, corresponding to a million-million-fold change in signal energy. All of this is achieved not with the latest silicon technology but by self-maintaining biological tissue, most of which is salty water. How does the ear do it? To address this question, we exploit the ear's curious ability to make sound while listening to sound.
