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 a Professor of Psychology.

Sekine Ozturk, Graduate Student

Sekine is a fifth 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 third-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 second-year PhD student in the Clinical Psychology Program at Stony Brook University. She graduated from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2022 and studied at Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research focuses on probabilistic learning and perceptual decision making for internalizing disorders under predictive processing framework. She ‘s specialized in using computational modelings (e.g., reinforcement learning), neuroimaging techniques (i.e., fMRI), and peripheral measures (e.g., EMG). 

Mary Kowalchyk, Graduate Student (she/her)

Mary is a second-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.

Jiacheng (Elisa) Xu, Graduate Student

Elisa is a first year PhD student in the Clinical Psychology program at Stony Brook University. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Psychology in 2021. Prior to Stony Brook, she worked at the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Elisa’s research focuses on how bodily sensations (interoception) affect emotion, perception, and decision-making in healthy and clinical populations. She aims to study interoception through a predictive processing lens using behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging methods.

Jason T. Katz, Research Support Specialist

Jason is our research support specialist. He graduated from Bryant University with a B.S. in Business Administration in 2021. He graduated from St. John’s university with a M.A. in psychology in 2024. During his M.A. he worked as a crisis counselor at the Long Island Crisis Center. He then worked as a substance use case manager at Seafield Center before joining our lab.

Lab Alumni

Kayla Donaldson, Ph.D. (she/her)
Post-Doctoral Research Health Science Specialist
Minneapolis VA Medical Center

Emmett Larsen, Ph.D. (he/him)
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Columbia University

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

Raisa Azad
Physicians Assistant Program, PCOM Georgia