Aprajita Mohanty, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
Appu received her B.Sc & M.Sc in Psychology from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, and went on to receive clinical psychology training at Central Institute of Psychiatry, Ranchi, India. Subsequently, she obtained a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. She completed her postdoctoral work in Cognitive Neuroscience at Northwestern University. Appu joined Stony Brook University in February, 2011 and is currently Associate Professor of Psychology.
Kayla Donaldson, Graduate Student (She/Her/Hers)
Kayla is a sixth-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Stony Brook. She graduated from Purdue University with a BS in Psychology and a BA in Communication before working at the San Francisco VA Medical Center/UCSF. Previously, she has worked in labs studying the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying deficits associated with schizophrenia. Her primary research interests are in integrating neural and psychophysiological (primarily fMRI and EEG), behavioral, and computational methods to investigate the mechanisms underlying cognitive and emotional dysfunction in psychotic disorders. She is particularly interested in how these mechanisms inform the course of psychotic symptom progression. Much of this research is done in collaboration with Dr. Roman Kotov through work on the Suffolk County Mental Health Project.
Emmett Larsen, Graduate Student (he/him/his)
Emmett is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Clinical Psychology program. Emmett obtained his undergraduate degree from St. Olaf College and then worked as a full-time research coordinator at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. His interests center around the basic processes involved in (social) cognition and emotion, and he is largely interested in understanding how these processes contribute to various types of belief formation and decision making. Examples include moral, religious, and political belief formation as well as delusional belief formation in psychotic populations, and delusion-like beliefs in both healthy and high-risk populations.
Xian Zhang, Graduate Student
Xian is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Clinical Psychology program. She obtained her B.A. in psychology from UCLA with a specialization in computing. Xian is primarily interested in affective neuroscience. In particular, she is interested in how emotion can impact perception and cognition, especially decision-making as well as examining underlying neural mechanisms using various neuroimaging techniques including EEG/ERPs, fMRI, ECoG, and NIRS.
Sekine Ozturk, Graduate Student
Sekine is a third year PhD student in the Clinical Psychology program at Stony Brook. She graduated from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities with a psychology major and a neuroscience minor. Before joining the lab, Sekine worked in full-time research positions at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests involve incorporating neuroimaging, behavioral, and computational methods to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of cognitive and emotional processing in transdiagnostic populations.
Megan Serody, Graduate Student (she/her/hers)
Megan is a second-year PhD student in the Clinical Psychology program. She obtained her B.S. in psychological sciences from the College of William and Mary. Before joining the lab, Megan worked in full-time research positions at Rutgers University and the University of Rochester Medical Center. Her primary research interests include comparing the effects of emotion on perceptual processes transdiagnostically, primarily in psychotic disorder and anxiety disorder populations.
Lancy (Xiaohe) Cao, Graduate Student
Lancy is a PhD student in the Clinical Psychology Program at Stony Brook University. She earned her B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Integrative Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2022. Her research focuses on incorporating psychophysiological measures such as fMRI, EMG, and SCR alongside behavioral tasks to explore affective decision-making She’s particularly interested in studying trans-diagnostic mechanisms using the predictive processing framework.
Mary Kowalchyk, Graduate Student (she/her)
Mary is a first year graduate psychology student in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Stony Brook. She graduated from Florida State University with a BS in Psychology and New York University with a MA in Psychology. Following her MA, she worked in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, initially as a research coordinator and then as a laboratory manager on studies examining the neural correlates of risk and resilience factors to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Her primary research interests are utilizing prediction modeling approaches to understand deficits in decision making, particularly in social cognition, in those with psychotic symptoms.
Lab Alumni
Shannon Glasgow, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Gabriella Imbriano, Ph.D.
Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center (MIRECC) Post-doctoral Fellow
Palo Alto VA and Stanford University
Jingwen Frances Jin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong.
Amri Sabharwal, Ph.D. C.Psych
Clinical Psychologist, CONNECT Cognitive Therapy, Toronto
Akos Szekely, Ph.D.
Data Aggregation Engineer, Medpro Systems.
Tamara Sussman, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University.
Megan Liew
PhD Candidate, Clinical Psychology, University of Missouri
Jonathan Teller
PhD Candidate, Clinical Psychology, Northern Illinois University
Maya Marder
PhD Candidate, Clinical Psychology, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
Thomas Malachowski
PhD Candidate Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania
Bernie Chen
PhD Candidate, Clinical Psychology, University of Delaware
Matthew Moss
PhD Candidate, Molecular Medicine, Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
Ruofan Ma
PhD Candidate, Clinical Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Ran Wang
Masters Program, Counseling Psychology, University of Pennsylvania