Current Fellows

Originally from Panama City, Panama, Adriana Mendez graduated from Emory University in 2018 with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Economics. While at Emory, she completed a senior thesis assessing the implications of bilingualism on learning in adults. She also worked as a research assistant at the Bauer Memory Lab where she studied memory development in school-aged children. Additionally, as a research assistant at the Atlanta VA Medical Center she worked with adults with chronic pain who had served in the United States armed forces. Finally, she was a Practicum Student at the Marcus Autism Center Severe Behavior Unit, where she worked to mitigate severe behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

As a fellow, Adriana collects eye-tracking data from infants and toddlers at high risk and low risk for ASD and works with the neuroimaging team collecting MRI data from infants from 0 to 6 months of age. Her second-year project focuses on examining the impacts of bilingual early-life language exposure on measures of sociovisual engagement through eye-tracking. After the fellowship, she hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology.

Tristan Ponzo graduated with distinction in 2018 from Cornell University with a B.S. in Human Development, concentrating in Human Behavioral Neuroscience and minoring in Biological Sciences.  During his time there, Tristan participated in research examining the hot and cold cognitive factors of risky decision making in adolescents and adults at both the behavioral and neural levels.  He used the imaging skills he accumulated in this role to complete a research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, where he applied various imaging techniques to examine the myocardial mechanics of early-stage metabolic syndrome as well as folic acid-induced acute kidney damage in porcine and rodent models.

As a Cohen fellow, Tristan conducts eye-tracking research focusing on infants and toddlers at high and low risk for ASD.  His work investigates the predictive power of eye-tracking data compared to gold standard diagnostic measures of ASD. Tristan also works on the neuroimaging team, where he seeks to relate features of infant brain networks to measures of variance in social visual engagement. After the fellowship, Tristan plans to pursue an MD and specialize in child neurology.

Elly Kushner graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 with a B.Phil (B.S with Honors) in Developmental Psychology with a focus in Education and a minor in Social Work. As an undergraduate, she worked in the Learning Imaging and Family Experience Laboratory which studied the impacts of early life stress on children’s cognitive and academic outcomes. She also pursued independent projects related to training and assessing the experiences of early child care providers working with children with ASD in the community. Additionally, she spent time as a research assistant in the Infant Communication Lab where she completed a thesis examining the relationship between infants’ early social attention and parent speech among children who are at high risk for ASD.

As an Education Sciences Research Fellow, Elly is pursuing projects that link measures of social visual engagement to children’s classroom behaviors and academic outcomes with the goal of creating and evaluating community viable educational interventions for students with ASD. In the future, Elly hopes to complete a doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology.

Originally from Nepal, Sanju Koirala graduated from Hamilton College, NY in 2019 with a B.A. in Neuroscience. As a recipient of Emerson Research Grant at Hamilton, she investigated the availability and use of mental health resources after the earthquake in Nepal and conducted creative writing workshops as a psychological healing space for school-children. She also worked in the Hamilton Learning Lab where she researched the computational theories and neural basis of learning. Her undergraduate research culminated in a senior thesis examining multi-sensory integration in adults and 6-7-year-old children. 

As a Simons Fellow, Sanju s using eye-tracking and neuroimaging data to examine the brain mechanisms underlying subjectively-perceived visual engagement and how such mechanisms differ between typically developing and ASD children. Additionally, she is streamlining reflexive and social smile detection in infants by setting up an automated smile coding pipeline. After the fellowship, Sanju plans to pursue a doctoral degree in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience.

Deniz Parmaksiz graduated from Emory University in 2019 with a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and a minor in German Studies. Her involvement in undergraduate research began as a work-study assistant for a pediatric leukemia laboratory at Emory, but it wasn’t until her summer internship at NorthShore Hospital, where she investigated the interactions of the microbiome and neurodevelopment in mice models, that she started considering a career as a scientific investigator. Determined to pursue this line of research, Deniz joined and spent the latter half of her undergraduate career as a member of BUILD lab at Emory, where she was involved with the Baby Microbiome study, helping examine the impact of prenatal stress and environmental exposures on infant development across the first 18 months of life. Deniz had the opportunity to extend her experiences to a broader scope as part of a summer position at Center for Children’s Health, the Environment, the Microbiome, and Metabolomics (C-CHEM2), during which time she continued to work at BUILD lab while also rotating the other laboratories and research cores within the center to investigate the relationships between pre- and postnatal environment and the impacts thereof on brain development and microbiome.

As a Simons Fellow, Deniz is involved with research studying the developmental trajectories of social visual engagement in ASD and hopes to focus on machine learning and computational methods during her time at Marcus. Following the fellowship, Deniz plans on pursuing an MD/PhD degree and working as a physician scientist.

Yixin (Stella) Yuan graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 with a B.S. in Neuroscience computational track and a minor in biological sciences. At CMU, she conducted research on epigenetic changes in the brain both during normal aging and in individuals with neurodegenerative disease. Her work was presented in an honors thesis on cell-type specific analysis of H3K27ac profile in aged individuals. Her interest in language acquisition also prompted her to conduct research on the neural correlates of speech segmentation at Tokyo Tech as her summer project. 

Her first-year project as a Simons fellow focuses on predicting functional communication outcomes in ASD versus typically developing children based on the trajectory of fixation patterns collected from longitudinal eye tracking sessions. Some of her other projects of interest are streamlining reflexive smile detection in infants by setting up an automated smile-coding pipeline, and performing a pilot study on to what extent peripheral blood-samples are predictive of neuronal gene expression profiles using mice RNA-seq data.