Former Lab Members

Feeling nostalgic?  Click here to see pictures of past lab members.

Anastasia Dimitropoulos

Anastasia received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Vanderbilt University in 2002, and her BA in Psychology from Emory University . Her dissertation was on the identification of ritualistic and compulsive behaviors in young children with Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS). She was an NIMH research fellow at the Yale Child Study Center , working with Bob Schultz and others from 2002-2005. During this time period, she learned to conduct fMRI studies, and worked extensively on understanding the neural bases of food seeking behaviors in PWS. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University , in the department of Psychology, where she continues to do fMRI and behavioral research on food seeking behaviors and other aspects of mental retardation.

Diana Robins

Diana received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, with a specialty in Neuropsychology, from the University of Connecticut in 2002. She completed her clinical internship in the Neuropsychology track at the University of Florida in 2001. She received her MA in Clinical Psychology from the University of Connecticut . She received her BA in Psychology and Neuroscience from Oberlin College , with High Honors in Psychology. Her dissertation was the validation of the M-CHAT, an instrument for the early detection of autism spectrum disorders, which was completed with the help of several federal and private funding sources including a predoctoral NRSA from NIMH. She was an NIMH and a Browne-Cox research postdoctoral fellow with Bob Schultz from 2002-2004. During this time she learned to conduct fMRI studies of autism spectrum disorders. Her research focused on cross modal integration of facial expressions and auditory prosody. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University , where she continues to work on fMRI studies of cross modal integration in collaboration with her former colleagues at Yale.

Marcel Jackowski

Marcel received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wright State University in 2001, where he completed his dissertation entitled "A Computer Aided Design System for 3-D Medical Image Segmentation". He was a postdoctoral fellow with the Developmental Neuroimaging Program (DNP) from 2002-2004, and is currently working with Yale Image Processing and Analysis Group (IPAG) (http://noodle.med.yale.edu/). His work focuses on the analysis and visualization of Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). His research interests include medical image analysis, computer graphics, computer vision, pattern recognition and distributed computing.

Andrea Jackowski

Andrea received her Ph.D. in Internal Medicine: Neuroimaging from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. She received her MS in Neurosciences: Neuroanatomy from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and her BS in Biological Sciences: Neuroanatomy from the Universidade Federal do Parana.  She was the Adjunct Professor in Human Anatomy on Universidade Luterana do Brazil from 1999 to 2001, before joining the DNP as a research postdoctoral fellow. Her work in our lab focused on neuroanatomical studies of developmental disorders, such as Williams syndrome. She was also instrumental in collaborative projects aimed at developing new image analytic techniques.  Currently, Andrea is an Adjunct Professor of Neuroanatomy and Morphology at the Federal University of Sao Paulo.

Cheryl Klaiman

Cheryl received her Ph.D. and Masters in School/Applied Child Psychology from McGill University in 2003 and her B.Sc. in Psychology from McGill University in 1994. She has broad range of clinical and research experience in the field of autism. After completing her clinical internship at the Yale Child Study Center in 2001, she worked as a research fellow with Dr. Schultz, initiating studies on cortical Event Related Potentials (ERPs) to understand face processing deficits in individuals with autism spectrum conditions. She became a faculty member of the Child Study Center in 2003, and coordinated the "Lets Face It!" intervention study through 2005.  She left our lab to take a position at the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto, CA.

Marc Thioux

Marc obtained his Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Louvain, in Belgium.  His research interests include neuroimaging and the study of number processing and calculation, and the study of numbers as a semantic category.  During his time in our lab, he worked with Bob Schultz and Cheryl Klaiman on fMRI studies of calculation and savant calendar calculators.  He left our lab in 2006 to join Christian Keysers’ Social Brain Lab at the Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences Neuroimaging Center in Groningen, Netherlands.

Former lab members who are now continuing their education:

Brian Pasley was a research associate with the Schultz Lab intermittently in the late 1990s while an undergraduate at Yale, and then again while simultaneously completing his Masters degree from 2002-2003 at NYU. He is currently a Neuroscience PhD student at Cal Berkley.

Christiann van der Gaag, MD. , was a visiting medical student in 1999 from the Netherlands who learned to conduct fMRI research at Yale. He is currently completing his PhD and psychiatry fellowship at the University of Groningen , in the Netherlands , where he continues to collaborate with Dr. Schultz on fMRI studies of autism, focusing on studies of social semantics.

David Grelotti was a Research Assistant working on fMRI studies of autism from 1999-2002, and is currently a medical student at Johns Hopkins University.

Carley Piatt was a Research Assistant working on fMRI studies of autism from 2003-2004. She is currently a graduate student in Experimental Psychology with Professor James Tanaka at the University of Victoria , in British Columbia , Canada . Carley continues to be a close friend of the lab and we see her regularly at the McDonnell Foundation Perceptual Expertise Network meetings each year.

Sylvia Glassco did web-design, scripting and automation, code analysis, and other computer-related tasks from 2003-2005, while an undergraduate at Yale. She is currently teaching math and science in the DC area.

Carla Brown was the Project Coordinator for the face training study from 2004-2006.  She is currently taking time off to travel and work in Asia , before returning to the states to begin her graduate studies.

Caitlin Connors was a research assistant working on fMRI studies of autism from 2004-2006, and is now pursuing a Masters in the Biomedicine, Bioscience, and Society (BIOS) program at the London School of Economics.