Hi! I’m John. I’m a Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer in Psychology. I think a lot about how neural geometry supports human behavior and experiences. I care deeply about how we can apply these principles to the classroom. I’ve also played a lot of instruments in a lot of bands. These interests have left me with a very particular, somewhat non-sequitir set of skills and projects that I’d like to tell you about here.
PhD in Psychology, May 2024
Columbia University
BA in Philosophy of Cognitive Neuroscience; BA in Music Performance; Minor in Chemistry, May 2017
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
theory testing, operationalization, conducting experiments
ggplot
peer-reviewed manuscripts, public science communication
posters, technical talks, public talks, lectures
pandas, numpy, mne, nipy, nistats
tidyverse, dplyr, ggplot
batch, slurm
spm, structs
end-to-end research, google drive, slack
tailoring assignments and projects
communicating takeaways and project needs
lecture roadmaps, syllabi, classroom inclusion
RSA, PCA, ICA
random slopes, shifted log-normal, logistic, gompertz
latent semantic analysis
brms, model comparison

Processing information along hierarchical scales of granularity is critical for many of the feats of cognition considered most human. Recently, the changes in structure, cortical connectivity, and apparent functional properties across parcels of the hippocampal long axis have been hypothesized to underlie this hierarchical gradient in information processing. We show here, however, that the choice of parcellation method itself drastically affects one particular measure of granularity across the hippocampus and that a functionally informed approach to parcellation reveals gradients both within the anterior hippocampus and in nonlinear form across the long axis. These results point to the issue of parcellation as a critical one in the study of the hippocampus and reorient interpretation of existing results.