Columbia Social Neuroscience Lab

Lab Director

Meghan Meyer

Meghan is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Columbia Social Neuroscience Lab. She completed her Ph.D. at UCLA and her post-doctoral training at Princeton University.
View CV

Post-doc Researchers

Tim Broom

Tim received his B.S. from the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Broadly speaking, his research uses functional neuroimaging to understand when and why individuals experience or represent the same social information similarly. If two people are absorbed in a movie, is their neural activity during that narrative experience more aligned than two people who are far less engaged? Do beliefs about race impact how individuals process minority group members’ disclosures of being discriminated against? His work focuses primarily on how loneliness impacts the neural representations of one’s social connections. If an individual feels isolated from those around them, how might this be reflected in their neural “mapping” of the people they know? In his free time, Tim likes to play guitar, read fiction, and spend time with his wife and daughter.

Sasha Brietzke

Sasha received her BA from Johns Hopkins University. After graduating, she pursued a post-baccalaureate fellowship at the NIH, where she studied impulsive decision-making in alcohol-dependent patients. She received a PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College. Currently, she is interested in investigating the self through a social cognitive lens. Specifically, how people organize their self-schema according to the dynamic social roles they play and how people characterize their self across various timescales. Outside of the lab, Sasha enjoys reading fiction and eating chocolate. Preferably at the same time.

Miriam Schwyck

Miriam earned her B.A. from Bethel College, KS and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Between undergraduate and graduate school, she spent time working in immigration law, then as a lab manager at Rutgers University and Princeton University. Broadly, her research uses methods and analyses from different fields to examine the structure of social knowledge and how it relates to one’s ability to thrive in social settings. Specifically, she is interested in how humans track and use information about their dynamic relationships, and how real-world social networks shape how we think about others and ourselves. Beyond research, Miriam enjoys camping, making ceramics, and drinking the perfect cup of tea.

Lab Manager

Kaitlyn Mundy

Kaitlyn graduated from Brown University with a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. During undergrad, she worked with the Shenhav Lab on research in cognitive control, motivation, and reinforcement learning. She’s interested in a wide variety of topics, but is currently most interested in social learning and inference. Outside of the lab, she enjoys hiking, reading, drawing, and really any activity you can do with a cat on your lap.

Graduate Students

Courtney Jimenez

Courtney attended UC Davis and graduated with a BS in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior and a BA in Psychology.  Courtney is interested in investigating the neural and cognitive mechanisms of social learning and memory using neuroimaging and computational methods. In her free time, she likes being outside, making people laugh, and learning new things!

Danika Geisler

Danika completed a BS in Cognitive Science and a BS in Informatics at Indiana University. While at Indiana University she completed an honors thesis investigating early facial processing in Aina Puce’s Social Neuroscience Lab. After graduating Danika worked as an IT Analyst for Eli Lilly and Co. Currently, she is interested in the role of the default network in social priming. Outside of the lab Danika enjoys hiking, board games, and reading.

Dhaval Bhatt

Dhaval received his BE in Electronics Engineering from BITS-Pilani (Goa, India) and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he worked as a signal processing engineer at Michael Platt’s lab, thereby broadening his interest from tools in engineering to applications in Neuroscience. Currently, his interest broadly covers imaging methods, rs-fMRI, information propagation models, graph theory, and social cognition. He enjoys puzzles, theatre, books, and coffee. If provided an open floor with groovy music, he doesn’t hesitate to shake a leg.

Era Wu

Era completed her BA in Sociology with minors in Philosophy and Psychology. After college, she worked at Rebecca Saxe’s lab as a lab manager. Now she is lucky enough to be in both CSNL and PhilLab to pursue her interest in moral psychology, decision making, social cognition, and causal reasoning. More specifically, she wants to explore people’s moral perceptions about collective agents and how these perceptions play out on the neural level. Outside of work, she enjoys reading, watching comedy shows, and sleeping.

Alumni

Siddhant Iyer

Lab manager (2021-2023). Sid graduated from University of Rochester with a B.A. in Brain & Cognitive Science. At our lab he analyzed individual differences in default network connectivity and affective memories, and also set up and collected data for a study on loneliness and rumination. He is now a PhD student at Columbia neuroscience and interested in modeling human cognitive dysfunction at the systems and behavioral level.

Alex DaSilva

Doctoral student (graduated 2021). Alex studied the relationship between mental health and real-world social interaction using naturalistic, mobile-sensing methods. Since graduating, he has been working as a data scientist at Merck. 

Christina Huber

Lab manager (2019-2021). Christina graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in psychology and a minor in human biology. As an undergrad she worked in Jamil Zaki’s lab, where she became fascinated by social psychological interventions to promote empathy, particularly in an intergroup context. In the DSNL, she worked on projects examining the role of the default network in stereotyping as well as how COVD-19 impacted intergroup psychology. Currently, she is a PhD student studying social neuroscience at UCLA working with Matt Lieberman.

Eleanor Collier

Lab manager (2017-2019). Eleanor graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in chemistry and a minor in creative writing. At the DSNL, she researched how to identify neural factors that promote social connections and strengthen relationships, with the eventual aim of helping people improve their relational well-being. In Fall 2019, she will continue to study these exciting questions as a graduate student, working with Brent Hughes at UC Riverside.