Senior Scientist
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Brian Levine, Ph.D., C.Psych., ABPP-cnSenior Scientist, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Health Sciences
Professor of Psychology and Medicine (Neurology), University of Toronto Dr. Brian Levine obtained his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of South Florida and completed fellowships in clinical neuropsychology at McLean Hospital in Boston and cognitive neuroscience at the Rotman Research Institute. He has published over 180 peer reviewed scientific articles and chapters on memory, frontal lobe function, traumatic brain injury, aging, dementia, and rehabilitation as well as Mind and the Frontal Lobes: Cognition, Behavior, and Brain Imaging (2012, Oxford University Press) and Goal Management Training™ intervention for executive deficits (with Ian Robertson and Tom Manly). He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science and recipient of the 2015 International Neuropsychological Society's Benton award for mid-career research achievement. His research has been funded by federal agencies (CIHR, NIH) continuously for the past 23 years. Dr. Levine, a board-certified neuropsychologist, is clinically active, providing expert opinions in cases involving brain injury, dementia, and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Levine is frequently called upon to communicate research findings to health professionals and the general public. He has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBC radio, USA Today, Psychology Today, Scientific American Mind, Wired, New York Magazine, and Discovery Health. |
Postdoctoral Fellows
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Ryan Yeung, Ph.D.
I completed my PhD at the University of Waterloo in 2022, studying memories that spring to mind involuntarily. Known as recurrent or intrusive memories, I found that these memories were surprisingly common in daily life. Importantly, properties of these memories were systematically related to individual differences. For instance, the emotional quality and the content (i.e., what people report remembering) of these memories significantly predicted symptoms of mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. In my postdoc, I hope to build on my past work by investigating cognitive and neural mechanisms of why emotional memories persist or fade away. I am particularly interested in hypotheses that emotional memories are enhanced due to their strong ability to evoke mental imagery; as such, emotional remembering might be modulated by individuals’ trait-level abilities to generate such imagery. Other research interests of mine include computational methods of analyzing autobiographical memories, such as natural language processing and machine learning. Outside of research, I’m a fan of hipster music, hipster tabletop role-playing games, and insisting that I’m not actually a hipster.
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Matt McPhee, Ph.D., C.Psych. (Supervised Practice)
I completed my PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Toronto in 2022. During my PhD, my program of research included two prominent foci. The first area focused on examining the bidirectional relationship between response inhibition and alcohol use behaviours; that is, how alcohol produces state-like alterations of response inhibition and, conversely, how response inhibition ability predicts alcohol consumption. The second major focus of my research was centred on clinically-informed questions, such as examining the feasibility of innovative behavioural interventions for behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. I completed a pre-doctoral internship in neuropsychology at Baycrest, where my passion for clinically-informed research flourished. In my postdoctoral fellowship, I will continue to build my clinical research program by examining individual difference factors that predict real-world treatment effectiveness of the Goal Management Training intervention. In general, I am interested clinically-driven research that has potential to improve healthcare outcomes and delivery. Outside of research, I’m an avid baker, I’m always trying to learn something new, and I love spending time outside, surrounded by nature.
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Graduate Students
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Carina FanI graduated from McGill university with a B.Sc. in Honours Psychology. At McGill, I worked on two main research projects: a behavioural and neuroimaging study investigating age-related changes to autobiographical memory and open-ended problem solving abilities, and a behavioural study examining the contributions of episodic memory processes to clinical decision making (i.e., diagnoses). Throughout high school and undergrad, I also spent several summers conducting research in a cerebrovascular physiology lab at the University of Calgary, studying the effects of aerobic exercise on brain blood flow and cognitive function in older adults. These combined experiences have led to a broad interest in how memory functions in the real world and contributes to other cognitive processes, and in how all this changes with age — and these are interests that I hope to explore during my graduate studies in the Levine Lab. Outside of research, I love reading, running, playing and listening to music, and finding obscure activities to explore around the city!
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Stephanie SimpsonI graduated from McGill University with an Honours B.Sc. in Psychology. For my Undergraduate thesis (supervised by Dr. Signy Sheldon), I worked on a project investigating how emotion affects the processes that underlie episodic memory retrieval in humans. Namely, I studied how transient mood states like happiness and sadness impact our ability to distinguish between similar items (i.e., pattern separation). To test the interaction between emotion and memory in a more real-life circumstance, we also examined the way positive and negative emotion impacts the recall of recent autobiographical events. These experiences helped foster my interest in other moderators of episodic memory (e.g., depression, sleep, individual differences), with the aim of using imaging technologies such as fMRI to better understand the neural substrates of episodic remembering. I am excited to begin my MA this year and hope to pursue these research avenues throughout the rest of my graduate studies in the Levine lab. Apart from the lab, I love reading fiction, travelling, listening to true-crime podcasts, watching live sports, and kayaking.
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Andreja StajduharI graduated from York University with a Specialized Honours BA in Psychology. During my undergrad, I was involved in a vision and perception lab where I worked on a range of projects, including an fMRI project that explored the representational gradient for objects along the dorsal and ventral visual streams in both younger and older adults. My undergraduate thesis was focused on understanding how we process partially occluded faces and how this processing style is affected under various conditions (partial occlusion, face inversion, etc.) in different populations. I am very excited to join the Levine Lab as a ph.D. student in Fall 2021 and I hope to continue to use technologies like fMRI to explore hippocampal functional connectivity as it relates to autobiographical memory. Outside of the lab, I love to read, run, listen to music and hang out with my friends!
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Lab Manager
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Divya MistryI graduated from Western University with a BSc. HSpec. in Psychology and a minor in Health Sciences. I completed my honors thesis with Dr. Paul Frewen and continued working with him as an RA at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry in the Department of Psychiatry. Our work advocated a trauma-informed care approach to integrating virtual reality technology with adjunctive psychotherapies. I also volunteer in Dr. Shannon Stewart's lab at Western University where we investigate the impact of interpersonal trauma on mental health outcomes, treatment responsiveness, service use, and caregiver distress in Canadian children and adolescents, using the global interRAI database. Outside of work I enjoy hiking, trying new restaurants with friends, tending to my houseplants, and cooking.
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Research Assistant
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Tolu FaromikaI recently graduated from the Psychology Specialist Co-op program from the University of Toronto. I also minored in Biomedical Ethics because of my interest in the rules of conduct that exist in clinical settings. My undergraduate thesis (supervised by Professor Andy Lee) was on how spatial contexts influence the memory integration/separation process. I’ve had the opportunity to assist in other labs such as the UTSC Infant Lab and the Schachar Crosbie Lab at the Hospital for Sick Children during my undergraduate degree. In these labs, I assisted with research relating to motor development in children as well as the factors involved in neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, ASD, and OCD in adolescents, respectively. I’m excited to be part of the Levine Lab because of my personal research interest in memory and memory deficits. In my spare time, I can be found hosting the BrainCore Podcast, painting, or playing a few different instruments in a concert band!
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Summer Students
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Nardeen Yalda
I recently graduated from Western University with a B.A. HSpec in Psychology. I completed my honors thesis with Dr. David Dozois investigating whether the structure and valence of parent/guardian- and partner- schemas predict interpersonal functioning in romantic relationships. I have also had the opportunity to work with Dr. Stefan Köhler as an independent study student to investigate how greater experience with everyday items influences our ability to discriminate between highly similar objects. I then worked as a lab coordinator and received an Undergraduate Student Research internship (USRI) in the Köhler Lab where I worked on investigating how patients with treatment-resistant depression perform on various hippocampally dependent memory tasks. I also had the opportunity to work as a research assistant in Dr. Erin Kaufman’s lab studying the influence of a sleep intervention on symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Additionally, I volunteered as a research/clinical assistant to Dr. Serena Wong at Parkwood Mental Health Institute where I provided supportive listening to in-patient older adults facing various psychopathologies, helped score neuropsychological tests, and aided in research investigating the utility of in-patient administered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Psychosis (CBT-P). I am excited to be working in the Levine Lab due to my interest in memory impairment resulting from various psychopathologies as well as my interest in inter-individual differences in higher cognitive functions. Outside the lab, I love reading, attempting to cook (it’s a learning curve), and hiking.
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Amina ShmanovaI am a third-year student at the University of Toronto with a Major in Cognitive Science and a minor in Computer Science and Psychology. My research interest revolves around the processes underlying human cognition and the understanding of how computer-based technologies can facilitate neuropsychological studies. I've had the opportunity to work and assist in labs such as Lingua Memoria at Baycrest Institute and UTSG Toronto Language and Cognition Lab. These experiences fostered my interest in the processes of formation and reactivation of conscious memories and the transformation of non-linguistic cognition into the verbal one. I hope to continue the exploration of cognitive processes through the Levine Lab. Outside of my academic interest, I enjoy reading literature and exploring new coffee places in Toronto.
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Ali AbdolizadehI am graduating from the University of Toronto this year with an Honors B.Sc. in Neuroscience. During my undergrad studies, I completed a research project with Dr. Ishrat Husain at CAMH on the efficacy and acceptability of pharmacotherapy for comorbid anxiety symptoms in bipolar disorder. I also collaborated with his lab on the studies of suicide and cognition in bipolar disorder. I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to research in the multimodal neuroimaging lab supervised by Dr. Ariel Graff at CAMH. My main project was investigation of the function of the glymphatic system in patients with schizophrenia using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). Working in Dr. Graff’s lab sparked my interest in the field of neuroimaging. In my master research project starting Fall 2022, I will obtain diffusion tensor image analysis along the perivascular space (DTI-ALPS) to further explore various features of the glymphatic system in schizophrenia. In Dr. Levine’s lab during Summer, I will mainly help the research team with preprocessing and analyzing the imaging data. Apart from the lab, I like techno music, reading, tarantino-like movies, and exploring the outdoors.
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Jordyn BurnettI graduated from Carleton University with a B.Sc. in Cognitive Science and specialization in Biological Foundations. My undergraduate thesis (supervised by Dr. Jennifer Bruin) investigated the role of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor and hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha signalling pathways in response to short-term high fat diet feeding in mice. Simultaneously, in my final year of undergraduate studies, I was fortunate to receive a scholarship for the I-CUREUS (Internship-Carleton University Research Experience for Undergraduate Students) program. For this, I spearheaded a research project evaluating practice questions implemented through a computer tutor and the associated learning outcomes for Python-novices in computer programming education (supervised by Dr. Kasia Muldner). I have always been intrigued by the function and dysfunction of biological systems, and I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with various research teams at SickKids Centre for Global Child Health and The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. I am incredibly excited to join the Levine Lab. Outside of the lab, I can be found playing ultimate frisbee, trying to solve sudoku puzzles, running, and spending time with family and friends.
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