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OUR TEAM

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LAB DIRECTOR

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Melissa Duff

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LAB COORDINATOR

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Nirav Patel

Nirav is a full-time research assistant/lab coordinator/lab manager. He graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a B.S. in Social Psychology and a concentration in Neuroscience. He is interested in changes in social cognition in TBI patients.

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POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLARS

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Arianna Rigon

Originally from Trento, Italy, Arianna has an M.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Padova, Italy (2013), and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Iowa (2017). She is interested in the long-term sequelae of traumatic brain injury in the cognitive, affective, and psychosocial domains. In particular, her research combines behavioral assessments and functional and structural neuroimaging (DTI, MRI/fMRI and more recently EEG) to examine the many factors that lead to dramatically different types of outcomes between survivors of TBI.

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Caitlin Hilverman

When we talk, we produce spontaneous movements with our hands called gestures. These gestures are related to spoken language in meaning – iconically depicting what is being communicated. Caitie’s research focuses on (1) how speakers alter their gestures for their listener while communicating, (2) how gestures are supported by systems of memory and how our gestures reflect our memory, and (3) how gesture can be leveraged to facilitate learning and enhance memory.

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GRADUATE STUDENTS

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Natalie Covington

Natalie V. Covington is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate with basic and applied research interests in the cognitive neuroscience of language. Her basic research to-date has primarily focused on interactions between hippocampal-dependent declarative memory and language use and processing.  Her applied research interests include characterizing the communicative and memory profiles of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) with the ultimate goal of improving clinical decision-making and treatment for these individuals.

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Emily Morrow

Emily is a speech-language pathologist and Ph.D. student in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.  Her primary research and clinical interests include neurological and social-cognitive processes of communication in patients with acquired brain injury, as well as how understanding those processes supports the most tailored and effective treatment strategies for improved long-term outcomes.

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Malcolm Edwards

Malcolm is a Neuroscience graduate student from Meharry Medical College. He is interested in the neural underpinnings of social cognition.

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UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ASSISTANTS

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Francine Erfe

Francine is a junior at Vanderbilt University studying Neuroscience and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include traumatic brain injury as it impacts memory, specifically declarative memory, and how that memory deficit impacts behavior in Traumatic Brain Injury patients.

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Meghan Kennedy

Meghan is a senior at Vanderbilt, majoring in neuroscience and English. She spent the past year as a research assistant helping with various projects in the lab, but she worked most notably on the Metaphor Project. This year she will be pursuing a Neuroscience Honors Thesis on the gesture production and cognitive maps of individuals with hippocampal damage