Bauer Lab Alumni
Hilary Miller-Goldwater, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
hilary.e.miller@emory.edu
Hilary has been a postdoctoral researcher since June 2018. She completed her doctoral dissertation in psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation focused on the role that language and visual attention play in the development of children’s spatial skills. She is particularly interested in understanding how children and adults acquire STEM-related skills and knowledge. To investigate these issues, she uses multiple methodologies including eye-tracking, textual analysis, coding of children’s speech and gesture and coding of parent interactions. In the Bauer lab she is working on projects related to how children implicitly integrate and self-derive new knowledge, how the content of story books and parent-child interaction around story books facilitates children’s learning, and how undergraduate students learn from diagrams in STEM courses. Check out her personal website for more information.
Katie Lee
Lab Coordinator | Senior Research Specialist
Katie graduated in 2017 from The University of Georgia with degrees in Psychology and Statistics. She has been working as a Lab Coordinator in the Bauer Lab since April 2018 where she is currently involved in research about self-derivation of facts through memory integration in children and adults. She also started working towards a MPH in Epidemiology at Rollins School of Public Health in 2020.
Greer Spradling
Lab Coordinator
greer.spradling@emory.edu
Greer graduated from Emory University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a double major in Sociology in May of 2022. As an undergraduate, Greer worked in Dr. Lilienfeld’s Lab on a number of studies focused on intellectual humility and cognitive biases. Greer has been a Lab Coordinator in the Bauer Memory Development Lab since June of 2022.
Lucy Cronin-Golomb, Ph.D.
lucy.miranda.cronin-golomb@emory.edu
Lucy graduated in 2017 from Tufts University with degrees in Biopsychology and English. Broadly speaking, her work focuses of semantic memory development. Specifically, she is interested in ways of maximizing child and adult learning outside of the classroom. Lucy joined the lab as a lab coordinator in 2017. Lucy also served as a graduate student in the Bauer lab from 2019 until 2023, when she obtained her doctorate. Lucy is now working as a consultant for Accessible Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Systems (ATLAS).
Julia Wilson, Ph.D.
julia.taylor.wilson@emory.edu
Julia graduated from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a concentration in Neuroscience. She joined the Bauer lab as graduate student in August 2018 and obtained her doctorate in 2023. Julia’s research interests lie in how we build a semantic knowledge base across development. In particular, she is interested in examining how we can facilitate the process of integration of factual information across separate episodes of learning and subsequent self-generation of novel information. Since graduating, Julia works as a UX Researcher at Docker.
Jessica Dugan, Ph.D.
Jessica graduated from the Honors College at the College of Charleston in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science in psychology and a focus in behavioral neuroscience. She joined the Bauer lab in the fall of 2014 and obtained her doctorate in 2020. After completing her graduate studies, Jessica served as a postdoc in the lab and later as a visiting assistant professor at Emory until 2023. She was involved in research about memory integration across development. As of the fall of 2023, Jessica is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Western Oregon University.
Marina Larkina, Ph.D.
Marina was a research associate in the Bauer lab from September 2007 to July 2016. She has since moved to the University of Michigan and remains an integral part of the Memory at Emory Lab’s research. Prior to joining the Bauer lab, she completed her doctorate in developmental psychology at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Her research concentrates on memory development. She is specifically interested in the role of social interactions in the development of autobiographical memory as well as in strategic remembering of preschool and early school-age children.
Melanie Hanft
Lab Coordinator
mhanft@emory.edu
Melanie graduated from Lehigh University in May of 2019 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. As an undergraduate, she worked in Dr. Hupbach’s Memory Lab where she studied long term effects of directed forgetting as well as reconsolidation in fear learning. She was a Lab Coordinator in the Bauer Memory Development Lab since July of 2019. She was involved in research about reactivation and child STEM book learning. She now works as a lead research specialist in Emory’s school of medicine.
Alissa Miller
Lab Coordinator
alissa.miller@emory.edu
Alissa graduated from Emory University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a minor in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies in May of 2020. She began her time in the Bauer Lab as an undergraduate research assistant during her senior year, working on studies about reactivation and metacognition, and transitioned to the role of Lab Coordinator in June of 2020. She was involved in research about child STEM book learning and memory integration over development. Alissa is now working as an English teacher in France.
Natalie Merrill, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
natalie.merrill@emory.edu
Natalie began as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab in June 2016. She earned her doctorate in the Cognition and Development program in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. For her doctoral dissertation she investigated intergenerational narratives, the stories of parents’ and grandparents’ memories passed down to their children. She continues to be interested in how individuals make sense of memories from their personal past and how social factors influence the processing of autobiographical memories.
Demet Kara
Doctoral Student
Demet joined the Bauer lab as a visiting student researcher with a Fulbright Ph.D. Dissertation Research Grant in September 2019. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in psychology from Bilkent University, and Master of Arts degree in developmental psychology from Koc University. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Middle East Technical University with a focus on developmental psychology. She is mainly interested in understanding the effect of gender in autobiographical memory. For her dissertation, she examines young adults’ memories about their siblings to identify the gender and culture based differences in autobiographical memory characteristics and narrative identities.
Blaire Porter
Lab Coordinator
bporte8@emory.edu
Blaire graduated from Trinity University in May of 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a minor in Spanish. As an undergraduate, she worked as a lab coordinator for the Children’s Research Lab at Trinity University where she contributed to studies about verb learning in children and adults. She began as a lab coordinator in the Bauer Memory Development Lab in June of 2018, and was involved in research about the integration and reactivation stages of the ERISS model. She has since started graduate school at the University of Texas, Austin.
Claire Johnson
Lab Coordinator
Claire graduated from The University of the South: Sewanee in May 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a minor in Women and Gender Studies. As an undergraduate, she worked in Dr. Coffey and Nelson-Coffey’s CARE Lab where she studied care-giving, affect and relationships. She began as a Lab Coordinator in the Bauer Memory Development Lab in September of 2019, and she was involved in longitudinal research about acquiring knowledge in childhood.
Ana Maria Hoffmann
Doctoral Student
Ana Maria Hoffmann graduated from the University of San Francisco in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience. She began her graduate career at Emory in 2017. Ana Maria’s research interests include the development of semantic memory in humans, particularly the factors that influence. In addition, she is interested in the effect that multilingualism plays in the building a semantic-knowledge base in children and adults.
Nicole Varga, Ph.D.
Nicole completed her doctorate in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology at Emory University in March 2016 and began her postdoctoral fellowship shortly thereafter. Through her undergraduate research at Ursinus College which focused on the importance of keeping episodes separate in memory to avoid memory errors, she became increasingly interested in the opposite question concerning how we integrate information in memory to construct a factual knowledge base. Using behavioral measures and electroencephalography (EEG) with children and adults, her Master’s and doctoral research examined the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying self-generation of new factual knowledge through integration of separate yet related episodes of new learning. Her current research continues to investigate the neurocognitive development of knowledge extension through memory integration, with particular emphasis on how brain-wide neuronal activity is coordinated to support this behavior, as well as how variability across individuals relates to academically-relevant achievement. Nicole is currently working as a post-doc with Alison Preston at UT Austin.
Jillian Lauer, Ph.D.
Jillian received her Bachelor of Science with honors in psychology from Tulane University. In 2013, she began her graduate studies at Emory University, where she is a George W. Woodruff fellow. Jillian’s research focuses on the development of spatial and mathematical cognition. She is particularly interested in the origins of individual and gender differences in spatial aptitude and their relation to educational outcomes in math and science fields. Her current interests include using behavioral, eye-tracking, and psychophysiological methods, along with meta-analytic techniques, to examine cognitive development in infants, school-aged children, and adults. She is currently working as a post-doc with Andrei Cimpian at NYU.
Alena Esposito, Ph.D.
Alena joined the Bauer lab as a postdoctoral fellow in August 2014. She completed her doctorate in Developmental Psychology at North Carolina State University. Her doctoral dissertation focused on cognitive effects of second-language acquisition, specifically for memory and executive function. Her previous experience as an elementary educator encouraged her interest in cognitive development within the classroom context. Her current research is investigating learning across languages, such as in dual-language education models. She is currently an assistant professor at Clark University.
Ruth Sirkin
Ruth graduated from North Carolina State University as valedictorian in December 2014, with Bachelors of Art in Psychology and Spanish and a minor in Japanese. She worked as a research assistant and project coordinator for the Memory and Narrative Development lab while at NC State as well as a research assistant at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. She was a lab coordinator in the Bauer lab from 2015 to 2017, working on projects using behavioral and eye-tracking methods of data collection. Her research interests include knowledge integration, learning, executive function, autobiographical memory, and the effects of language on cognition and educational outcomes.
Adna Jaganjac
Adna graduated from Emory University in 2016 with a degree in psychology and English. She began working in the Bauer Lab as an undergraduate student, conducting research examining memory integration in preschool and elementary school children. She was a lab coordinator in the Bauer Lab until July of 2018 and worked on various projects, including studies of knowledge integration as well as work on mental rotation and autobiographical memory. Adna is currently working as a clinical coordinator at Johns Hopkins.
James Daly
Jimmy graduated with honors from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a minor in East Asian Studies, Japan Subplan. During his undergraduate career, he was a research assistant in the Social Learning Lab and the Eating Disorders Research Program. He has been a lab coordinator in the Bauer Lab since 2017 and is currently involved in research of knowledge integration, dual-language education and metacognition. Jimmy is currently a graduate student at University of Texas, Austin.
Anaïs Stenson, Ph.D.
Anaïs earned her Bachelor of Art in philosophy from Scripps College. She then completed her Master of Art in philosophy, with a concentration in neurophilosophy, from Georgia State University. Her Master’s thesis used electroencephalography and behavioral measures to evaluate whether engagement with emotionally-versus orthographically-focused tasks modulated the effects of subconsciously presented primes on subsequent stimulus processing. In 2012, Anaïs began work on her doctorate at Emory University, where she was a George W. Woodruff fellow, and she completed her Ph.D. in September 2017. Her primary research interest is emotion-cognition interactions, particularly in the context of learning and reasoning. She uses neural, psychophysiological, and behavioral measures to explore these issues across multiple levels of description.
Aoxiang Xu
Aoxiang earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science at Jilin University in China. He then entered the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning in Beijing Normal University in China. He completed his Master’s thesis on the emotional bias and aging effect on prospective memory, and received his MS degree in Psychology. Aoxiang was member of the Bauer lab from 2012 until 2016. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the development of location memory and emotional memory.
Filiz Sayar, Ph.D.
Filiz joined the Bauer lab as a visiting scholar from Turkey during Summer and Fall 2016. She received a Master of Art in cognitive psychology from Bosphorus University and then proceeded to earn her doctorate in experimental psychology from Hacettepe University. Her Master’s thesis focused on metacognition and her doctoral dissertation examined explicit and implicit memory differences among adolescents, younger adults and older adults. Currently, her research interests include emotional memory, memory development, and intentional forgetting.
Rebekah Stewart
Rebekah graduated with honors from Georgia Tech in 2012, receiving a Bachelors of Science in Psychology. While at Georgia Tech, Rebekah was a research assistant in the Adult Cognition and Aging lab. She also completed a Senior thesis, focusing on how cognitive and emotional experiences during test-taking influence test performance. In the Bauer Lab, Rebekah’s research examined memory for location and emotional development in children.
Kevin Dugas
Kevin was a member of the Bauer lab from Fall 2007 to Summer 2009. He studied consolidation processes in infants using the deferred imitation paradigm. He also worked on the longitudinal autobiographical memory project looking at maternal elaborative support during past event conversation. Kevin completed his master’s degree in School Psychology at McGill University and is now Director of School Operations at The Gaelic College.
Joanne Deocampo, Ph.D.
Joanne was a Bauer lab member from Winter 2008 to Summer 2009. She was involved in the pretesting of the cognitive portion of the NIH Toolbox Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Functions. She worked in developing pretesting instruments that are part of a comprehensive battery of cognitive assessment tools. Joanne is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia State University.
Priscilla San Souci, Ph.D.
Priscilla was a member of the Memory at Emory Lab from Fall 2008 to Fall 2009. She studied the development of semantic knowledge in young children. She was also involved in the ERP project on emotional memories, investigating neural processes at the time children recalled personal events of positive and negative valence.
Ayzit Doydum
Ayzit worked at the Bauer lab from Fall 2007 to Summer 2010, working on a number of different projects. She studies associative learning in early infancy using a eye-blink conditioning method. She also worked with older children, investigating long-term episodic memories and development of abilities to remember temporal order as well as where information of personally experienced events. She is currently a graduate student in Cognitive Neuroscience at Vanderbilt University.
Jeni Pathman, Ph.D.
Jeni was a graduate student in the lab from Fall 2005 to Spring 2011. Jeni’s focus was on the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory. She used behavioral measures, ERP, eye-tracking, and fMRI to learn about the development of memory, especially memory of temporal order. Jeni completed postdoctoral training at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis and is now a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Jennifer Stevens, Ph.D.
Jennifer was a Ph.D. student in Cognition and Development within the Department of Psychology from 2007 to 2012. Her research focused on how emotion changes the way that memories are formed and retrieved. In her work at the Bauer lab, she studied effects of emotion on autobiographical memory retrieval in children and adults in some of the first ERP studies of autobiographical memory. She also studied neural correlates of the enhancing effect of emotion on episodic memory formation in school-aged children. Jenni is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Psychiatry at Emory University, studying the neural processing of emotional stimuli in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with the Grady Trauma Project.
Jessica King
Jessica was a member of the Bauer lab from Fall 2009 to Spring 2012. She was primarily involved in the projects that examine both episodic and semantic memory and the ability of children to integrate learned knowledge. She also worked with adult participants, using an ERP method to study the neural processes involved in integration. Jessica is currently working as a clinical research assistant researching neurogenetics and white matter disease in Washington D.C. at the Children’s National Medical Center.
Felicia Jackson
After completing four semesters as an undergraduate research assistant in the Bauer lab, Felicia returned to work as lab coordinator, a position she held from Fall 2009 to Summer 2012. In her research she investigated the interaction between episodic and semantic memory as it develops and changes from childhood into adulthood, and also explored the relationship between emotions and memory. Felicia is currently a graduate student in clinical psychology at SUNY Stony Brook University.
Aylin Tasdemir
Aylin was a PhD. student in the Bauer lab from 2010 to 2012. Her work investigated the development of autobiographical memory and childhood amnesia. She now continues her research at the University of Florida.
Ayla Nolen
Ayla worked as lab coordinator for the Memory at Emory lab from Summer 2011 to Fall 2012. Her research was aimed at understanding the factors that influence integration of knowledge in preschool and school age children. In addition, Ayla investigated the development of locational memory processes.
Nicole Hättenschwiler
Nicole was an exchange student from Switzerland who joined the Bauer lab for the Summer and Fall of 2012. She worked primarily on her Master’s thesis on autobiographical memory in adolescents and adults before returning to Switzerland to continue her research.
Elizabeth White
Elizabeth graduated from Emory in May, 2009 receiving a Bachelor of Art with high honors in psychology. She worked as a research assistant for the Bauer Lab and conducted her honors thesis with Dr. Bauer, investigating the development of autobiographical memory in school-age children. She worked on studies in the lab that investigated factors that influence integration of knowledge in school-age children until May 2014. Elizabeth has since completed a Master’s in Public Health at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University with a concentration in Health Policy & Management. She is currently working as a Program Analyst for Carter Consulting, Inc. based in Atlanta, GA.
Shala Blue, Ph.D.
Shala was a postdoctoral fellow in the Bauer lab from January 2013 to July 2014. She completed her doctorate in psychology with a concentration in neuroscience and animal behavior at Emory University. Her dissertation was on the comparative study of the development and neural substrates underlying relational memory. Shala’s research interests were the development of memory abilities and the processes underlying developments in memory. She was also specifically interested in how memory is affected by neurodevelopmental disorders as well as brain abnormalities throughout life. Shala began a research position at Fort Benning in Columbus, GA in July 2014.
Jackie Leventon, Ph.D.
As a graduate student, Jackie examined the interaction of emotion and cognition in development, adding measures of underlying neural activity to inform the processes. Her research featured the use of ERPs, as well as behavioral and self-report measures, to examine emotion and memory processes in infants, children, and adolescents. For her Master’s thesis, she developed a paradigm to examine the changes in infants’ neural activity representing the acquisition of emotion information. Infants’ ERPs to novel objects were recorded both before and after parents provided fearful, happy, or neutral expressions toward the objects, thus providing a measure of the change in neural activity that was specific to the introduction of emotion information. Jackie expanded her investigation of emotion-cognition interactions to questions of emotional memory in school-age children, the focus of her dissertation. Using ERP, behavioral, and self-report measures, she examined whether emotional arousal during encoding enhances subsequent memory (a pattern observed in adults). She completed her Ph.D. in May 2013 and is currently a faculty member at Towson College in Maryland.
Amanda Broyles
Amanda graduated from Emory in May of 2013, receiving a Bachelor of Art in Psychology, while also minoring in Women’s Studies. She worked as a research assistant as well as the scheduler for the Bauer lab during her time as an undergraduate student at Emory. After graduation, she continued to work in the Bauer lab as a lab coordinator until July of 2015. She is now pursuing her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at the University of Houston.
Monique Mendonca
Monique was a Ph.D. student in the Bauer lab from 2013 to 2015. Her work investigated the influence of emotion on memory across development.
Obiageli Nwamu
Obiageli was an Emory undergraduate student majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology, who graduated in 2017. She is a dedicated student from North Carolina on the pre-medical track and hopes to become an influential allopathic medical doctor in the future. She has enjoyed her time at the Bauer lab as it has provided her with the opportunity to learn more about multiple aspects of memory development and electrophysiological methods of quantifying this development.