People

Director

Emily Falk
Email: falk@asc.upenn.edu
Phone: 215-573-1974
Office: 328 ASC
Emily Falk is an Associate Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania. Prof. Falk employs a variety of methods drawn from communication science, neuroscience and psychology. Her work traverses levels of analysis from individual behavior, to diffusion in group and population level media effects. In particular, Prof. Falk is interested in predicting behavior change following exposure to persuasive messages and in understanding what makes successful ideas spread (e.g. through social networks, through cultures). Prof. Falk is also interested in developing methods to predict the efficacy of persuasive communication at the population level. At present, much of her research focuses on health communication, including recent work exploring neural predictors of increased sunscreen use, neural predictors of smoking reduction, and linking neural responses to health messages to population level behavioral outcomes; other areas of interest include political communication, cross-cultural communication, and the spread of culture, social norms and sticky ideas. Prof. Falk's work has been funded by NCI, NICHD, NIDA/the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, ARL, DARPA and ONR. Prior to her doctoral work, Prof. Falk was a Fulbright Fellow in health policy, studying health communication in Canada. She received her bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Brown University, and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Research Scientists

Matt O'Donnell
Email: mbod@asc.upenn.edu
Matt is a Research Scientist at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research background includes corpus linguistics, natural language processing and data mining with a focus on extracting linguistic patterns and networks from large textual databases (or corpora). He is interested in combining linguistic analyses of media language and persuasive discourse with behavioral and neuroscience approaches.
Emile Bruneau
Email: ebruneau@asc.upenn.edu
Dr. Emile Bruneau comes from a research scientist position at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication. Prior to his formal training in neuroscience, Emile worked, traveled and lived in a number of conflict regions: South Africa during the transition from Apartheid to Democracy, Sri Lanka during one of the largest Tamil Tiger strikes in that nation’s history, Ireland during “The Troubles”, Israel/Palestine around the Second Intifada. Emile is now working to bring the tools of science to bear on the problem of intergroup conflict by (1) building methods to better characterize the (often unconscious) cognitive biases that drive conflict using explicit, implicit and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques, and (2) critically evaluating efforts aimed at transcending these biases.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Nicole Cooper
Email: ncooper@asc.upenn.edu
Nicole is a postdoctoral researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication. She received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Neuroscience Graduate Group at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. Nicole's research investigates the neural mechanisms of behavior change and decision making, and focuses particularly on the role of the medial prefrontal cortex.
Yoona Kang
Email: ykang@asc.upenn.edu
 Yoona is a postdoctoral researcher at the Annenberg School for Communication. Her research investigates psychological and neural mechanisms that support the development and changes in social cognition, emotions, and health outcomes. Her main research interests are in 1) linking social cognitive and affective processing in the brain to health outcomes, and 2) designing interventions that guide adaptive changes in social processing to promote emotional and physical wellbeing. Yoona’s work draws conceptual and methodological tools from Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Contemplative Science, and Health Communication. She examines converging evidence across a wide range of tools, including first person reports, implicit measures, behavioral outcomes, and neuroimaging results (fMRI, fNIRS, EEG). Yoona received her PhD in Psychology from Yale University and BA in Psychology from UCLA. During her doctoral program, she also worked with clinical neuroscientists and contemplative scientists at Brown University as a visiting scholar.
Bruce Doré
Email: bruce.dore@asc.upenn.edu
Bruce is interested in the regulation of positive emotion in health and psychopathology. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Guelph, and his M.A. in Psychology at Columbia University under the support of an NSERC graduate fellowship. In his research, he uses behavioral, neuroimaging, and large-scale observational methods to ask questions about the motivational, cognitive, and brain processes that determine how we respond to and recover from emotional events. Current projects investigate the cognitive and brain processes that underlie our ability to, ‘look on the bright side,’ in response to negative life experiences, the motivational factors that influence when and how we choose to regulate our emotions, and how these abilities and motivations change from young to older adulthood.
Steve Tompson
Email: tompson@umich.edu
Steve is a Ph.D. student in the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan. He is interested in using neuroimaging to understand the social cognitive processes that mediate sociocultural differences in self-appraisal and decision-making. He is also interested in extending this research to examine the contribution of self-appraisal processes to attitude change and behavior change.

Research Staff

Nick Wasylyshyn
Email: nwasyl@math.upenn.edu
 Nick is a post-masters researcher contracting for the Army Research Lab. He received his masters in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and has joined the Falk lab to extend his expertise in machine learning to the field of neuroscience. He specializes in predicting behavior change from fMRI data.

Graduate Students

Kristin Shumaker
Email: kshumaker@asc.upenn.edu
Kristin is a doctoral student in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in using neuroimaging methods, including fMRI and fNIRS, to examine the neural mechanisms of message propagation, social influence and narrative persuasion in health messaging and cultural participation.
Elisa Baek
Email: ebaek@asc.upenn.edu
Elisa Baek is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication. She is interested in the neural cognitive mechanisms involved in message propagation and social influence, especially in relation to the processing of news framing and its impact on information diffusion. She is also interested in the neural mechanisms of stereotypes and racism.

Elissa Kranzler
Email: elissa.kranzler@asc.upenn.edu
Elissa Kranzler is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication. Broadly, she is interested in the relationship between media exposure and health-related behaviors in youth and young adult populations. Specifically, she has been studying the relationship between exposure to mass media anti-smoking campaigns and smoking cognitions and behaviors in a nationally representative sample of adolescents. Elissa received her BS in Music Education from New York University and M.S.Ed. in Learning Technologies in Education from the University of Pennsylvania.

Rui Pei
Email: rpei@asc.upenn.edu
Rui (pronounced “ray”) is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania.Rui is interested in communication strategies that alter the health-related attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, especially areas such as adolescent decision-making, technology-based communications, social media and well-being. She hopes to combine neuroscience and psychology methodologies and investigate how social factors influence cognition and behavior in the field of health communication.

Prateekshit Pandey
Email: prateekshit12078@iiitd.ac.in
Prateekshit Pandey joined the lab as doctoral student in Fall 2016. He is interested in working on understanding the effects of online social media on human social behavior. He has completed a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi. During his undergrad years, he was actively involved in research areas of deep machine learning, biometrics and image processing.

Jacob Parelman
Email: jacob.parelman@asc.upenn.edu
 Jake is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication. Jake is interested in discovering what the brain can tell us about how individuals and groups receive, process and share information. Jacob is particularly interested in understanding how social factors, like network characteristics or group norms, and messaging effects, like humor and fear tactics, affect neural activity and behavior, especially as they relate to the evaluation of news and media. Before coming to the lab Jake worked as a lab manager at the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU Boulder, where he also received his BA in 2014.

Lab Managers

Alexandra Paul
Email: alexandra.paul@asc.upenn.edu
Ally is a co-lab manager and research coordinator for the CN Lab. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College with a BA in Psychology. Her previous research has looked at: the effects of social norms on motivation and short term memory; the role of anticipated regret in decision-making among clinical populations; and use of music-based, mindful meditation during a preoperative informed consent process. She is interested in learning more about large-scale interventions that effectively communicate medical information and promote healthier lifestyle choices.
Melis Çakar
Email: melis.cakar@asc.upenn.edu
Melis Çakar (pronounce “meh-lease cha-car”) is a co-lab manager and research coordinator for the CN Lab. She received her BA in Neuroscience from Pomona College in 2017. She previously researched the relationship between stress, depression, and neuroplasticity in rats and the role of verb aspect-dependent reactivation in memory reconsolidation in human subjects. Melis is currently interested in learning more about persuasive discourse and the neural predictors of behavioral change in response to persuasive messages.

 Undergraduate Research Assistants

  • Ana Acevedo
  • José Carreras-Tartak
  • Madeline Fagen
  • Lizette Grajales

Alumni

Former Postdoctoral Fellows:

  • Jason Coronel: Jason is an assistant professor at The Ohio State University.
  • Agnes Jasinska: Agnes is an assessment coordinator at the Office of Institutional Research and Planning at Bucknell University.
  • Teresa Pegors: Teresa is an assistant professor at Azusa Pacific University.
  • Ralf Schmaezle: Ralf is an assistant professor at Michigan State University.
Former Graduate Students:
  • Joe Bayer: Joe is an assistant professor at The Ohio State University.
  • Josh Carp: Josh is currently an innovation specialist at 18F.
  • Chris Cascio: Chris is an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  • Minji Kim: Minji is a post-doc at the University of California, San Francisco.
  • Jiaying Liu: Jiaying is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia.
  • Christin Scholz: Christin is an assistant professor Amsterdam School for Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam.
Former Lab Managers:
  • Liz Beard: Liz is pursuing a PhD in Decision Neuroscience at Fox School of Business at Temple University
  • Susan Hao: Susan is pursuing a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Lynda Lin: Lynda is currently a graduate student in Psychology at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  • Frank Tinney: Frank is currently a medical student at Wayne State University.
Former Programmer:
  • JP Obley: JP is currently a senior UX engineer at DeepField.

Past Research Assistants

  • Susan Zhang
  • Cristine Oh
  • Kinari Shah
  • Becky Lau
  • Alison Sagon
  • Gabrielle Cheng
  • Larisa Svintsitski
  • Caroline Meuser
  • Jackie Cho
  • Lauren Wilson
  • Megan Black
  • Alexander Riccio
  • Julia Shteyngardt

Collaborators

Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D.
Lab Website

Elliot Berkman, Ph.D.
Lab Website

René Weber, Ph.D., M.D.
Lab Website

Sara Konrath, Ph.D.
Lab Website



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