João Guassi Moreira, Ph.D.

João is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab. He is interested in affective and social phenomena, specifically in the context of emotion regulation and decision-making. In CSNLab, João is using functional magnetic resonance imaging in conjunction with computational methods to investigate how mental representations of others shape decision behaviors involving familiar others. He hopes that one downstream application of this work will be to promote the development of healthy mental wellbeing in youths. He previously received his BS in psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed his Ph.D. in developmental psychology with Jennifer Silvers at UCLA. If you manage to find João outside the lab, you’ve probably caught him at bar trivia, rock climbing, or exploring the Great Los Angeles Abyss. In 2024, João will begin as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Information for those interested in joining the lab as postdoctoral fellows can be found here.

Lisa (Yixuan) Shen

[Email]

Lisa is a first-year graduate student in the lab. She graduated from UCLA in 2021 with a B.A. in Psychology and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics. After graduating, she started her work as a lab manager in the lab. She is interested in studying social neuroscience in the context of social networks. Specifically, she wants to investigate how individual differences in social network positions shape and are a result of interindividual variability in socio-behavioral tendencies (e.g., need-to-belong, curiosity) and underlying sociocognitive processes (e.g., mentalizing, selective social attention, and valuation). One research direction she also wants to explore the influence of cultural factors and affective characteristics on social cognition.

Meng Du

[Web]

Meng is a fourth-year graduate student. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in psychology and computer science, and then worked in the lab as a software developer before becoming a graduate student. She is broadly interested in many aspects of social cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence, especially applying computational methods to understand the social processes in the brain, and comparing these processes to deep neural networks (e.g., vision-language transformers). She is also interested in making transformers more interpretable and brain-like, as well as understanding domain-general mechanisms for social functions and other cognitive processes.

Kevin M. Tan

[Web] [Email]

Kevin, a third-year graduate student, studies the computational mechanisms subserved by the default mode network (DMN). Specifically, he is interested in how these mechanisms are co-opted by social and affective processes. Kevin's current projects include 1) investigating the impact of pre-stimulus DMN activity on socioaffective judgments via decoded neurofeedback, and 2) exploring the spatiotemporal dynamics of mentalizing via electrocorticography. Kevin received a B.S. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon, where he worked in the labs of Greg Siegle and Michael Tarr. Currently, Kevin works with Matthew Lieberman and Carolyn Parkinson as a PhD student and NSF Research Fellow at UCLA.

Louisa Lyu

Louisa is a first-year graduate student in the lab. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2024 with a B.S. in Statistics and a B.A. in Psychology. She is interested in studying how individual differences in social perception are represented in the brain. Specifically, she aims to use neurocomputational methods, such as fMRI and large language models, to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and behaviors. Ultimately, she hopes to develop ways to "mind-read" people's personality traits or perceptions of the social world based on their brain imaging data.

If you're interested in joining the lab as a Ph.D. student next fall, please apply to the UCLA Ph.D. program by Dec. 1.

Gina Jackson

[Email]

Gina earned her B.S. in Cognitive Science from UCLA in 2023 and soon after became a lab manager. Her research interests focus on the sociocognitive processes that are involved in the creation and maintenance of social structures and hierarchies. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in social neuroscience, in hopes of one day conducting research of her own. Her aim is to promote the implementation of research in policy making in order to reduce disparity, marginalization, and socioeconomic hardship.

Concepción Esparza

Concepción is a staff research associate who graduated from UCLA in 2022 with a B.S. in Psychobiology. She is interested in studying the neural basis of moral cognition and how social factors may influence moral cognitive processes. In the future, she would like to study cognitive neuroscience and to pursue a Ph.D..

Shriya Amara

Shriya is a volunteer research assistant who is currently a sophomore at UCLA majoring in neuroscience. She is interested in studying why we interact with people the way we do, how past experiences shape future interactions, and learning about the convergence of psychology and biological systems. She would like to use this information to healthy relationships and mental health. In the future, Shriya would like to continue research in psychology, while pursuing an MD/MBA.