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.

Fredrik Ahs obtained his master's degree in clinical psychology from Uppsala University, Sweden. During his doctoral studies in Mats Fredrikson's lab, he investigated the role of amygdala function in fear learning and specific phobia. He started in Kevin Labar?s lab 2009 and is currently studying the role of the medial temporal lobe in contextual fear. He is also investigating how genetic factors contribute to individual variability in fear conditioning together with Kevin Labar and Ahmad Hariri.

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 fourth 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 fourth 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 third 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 second 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.

Phil Kragel is a first year graduate student in the Psychology and Neurosceince Department. He received both his B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering and Masters in Engineering Management from Duke University. His current research uses machine learning to examine the linkage between physiological and emotional states. He is also interested in theoretical and methodological issues related to applications of machine learning to high dimensional datasets such as fMRI.

Dana Rosen is a senior majoring in psychology who joined the lab in September 2010.

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.

Megha Girdhar joined the lab in August 2010.