Nicole Huff earned her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She went on to complete her M.A. in Psychology at the University of Texas prior to returning to Boulder to receive her Ph.D. in Neuroscience and psychology in Jerry Rudy's laboratory. She studies the role of hippocampus in contextual processing and conditioning. Nicole joined the LaBar lab as a postdoctoral associate in 2005. She recently received a post-doctoral NRSA fellowship.

Steven J. Stanton received his B.A. in Economics and Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2002, where he completed his honors research with Bill McKeachie. He returned to the University of Michigan to complete his M.S. (2006) and Ph.D. (2008) in Personality and Biopsychology with Oliver Schultheiss. At the U of M, he studied the biological basis of human motivation. Specifically, he studied the relationship between humans' implicit motives for power, affiliation, and sex and steroid hormones (testosterone, estradiol, cortisol, and progesterone). In 2008, Steve joined the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow in collaboration with Drs. Kevin LaBar and Scott Huettel. At Duke, Steve has continued to study endocrine aspects of dominance behavior at the level of macro-scale dominance competition (e.g., political elections, sports competition). Steve is also extending his past research on steroid hormones and motivation into the field of neuroeconomics and economic decision making by studying associations between individuals' steroid hormone levels, their risk preferences, and their neural responses to making risky decisions.

Curriculum Vitae

Steven Prince received his B.S. in Human Development (Cognitive Science concentration) from Cornell University. He worked for 2 years as laboratory manager for Dr. Daniel Schacter at Harvard University and was involved in studies of priming and item-specific versus gist-based memory. After all that time in the sunny northeast, he came to Durham, NC and received his PhD with Dr. Roberto Cabeza at Duke University. His research focused on episodic memory and included several fMRI studies investigating the neural correlates of successful encoding and retrieval processes. Steve then did a postdoc at Duke University Medical Center with Dr. Jeffrey Petrella studying the structural and functional neural changes that occur in Alzheimer's disease. In the LaBar lab, his research will focus on the interaction of stress and memory. This work is motivated by animal research using water maze and other learning tasks and will involve adapting these for human neuroimaging studies. Steve is also interested in how medial temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, and default mode brain regions are recruited with changes in memory content, memory processes, and situational and motivational demands.

Joey Dunsmoor received his B.S. in Psychology from James Madison University in 2004. Following graduation, he worked as a postbaccaleurate fellow in Peter Bandettini's Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD. Joey is currently a third year graduate student in the Labar lab. His research focuses on the brain mechanisms underlying learned fear, and the impact of emotion on human memory systems.

Vishnu "Deepu" Murty received his B.S. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 2005. Following graduation, he worked as a postbaccaleurate fellow under Dr. Anand Mattay in the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch studying cognitive aging, genetics, & fMRI. Vishnu is a third year graduate student in Neurobiology/Cognitive Neuroscience. His research focuses on how serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems impact the brain mechanisms underlying emotion and reward processing.

Crystal Reeck is a second year graduate student in the LaBar lab beginning in the fall of 2008. She received both her Bachelor's and her Master's degrees in Psychology from Stanford University, under the mentorship of Dr. James Gross. Following graduation, she joined Dr. Anthony Wagner's lab as a full-time research assistant. Her research focuses on neural mechanisms underlying the interaction of cognition and affect in learning and memory.

Jessica Lakereceived her B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology from Emory University in May 2009. She is a first year graduate student in the Cognitive Neuroscience program. While rotating in the LaBar lab she plans to study the cross-modal effects of emotion on time perception.

Allison Bullock is a psychology and neuroscience major who began working as a research assistant in the LaBar lab during January 2009. She is working under Joey Dunsmoor on studies relating to fear generalization and aims to complete an honors thesis on sensory preconditioning. After her graduation in 2011, she hopes to go to graduate school for clinical psychology.

Philip Polychroniou is a junior who joined the lab in January 2009.

Glen Gutterson is a junior who joined the lab in May 2009.

John Luttrell is a sophomore who joined the lab in September 2009.

Matthew Fecteau received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Maine. He went on to complete 2 years of graduate study in Biological Psychology at the University of Maine. In graduate school he studied the effect of repeated alcohol withdrawal on circadian rhythms. He then spent a year at UNC-Chapel Hill studying alcohol motivated behavior. Matt became the LaBar lab manager in the summer of 2007.

Phil Kragel joined the lab in September 2009, but has been providing the lab with some data analysis assistance for more than a year now.