People

Principal Investigator

Kelly S. Giovanello, Ph.D. | Google Scholar
kgio@unc.edu

Kelly was born and raised in Carver, Massachusetts. She completed her BS degree in Biology at Stonehill College (1995), MS degree in Neuroscience at Brandeis University (1996), and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Boston University (2003). She spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging (2003-2006). In 2006 she became a faculty member at UNC Chapel Hill in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and started the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Laboratory. She is now a tenured Professor in the Department and serves as the Associate Director of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research interests center on understanding the cognitive processes and neural mechanisms that give rise to human memory, and how mnemonic processes change across the adult lifespan. In her free time, Kelly enjoys spending time with her husband and two children, reading fiction series, and gardening.

Graduate Students

Min Sung Seo | CV |
msungseo@unc.edu

Min Sung is a 5th-year doctoral student born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. He completed his B.S. in Psychology with a concentration in Neuroscience at Pennsylvania State University. Min Sung’s research focuses on the effects of aging on various aspects of episodic memory at both the behavioral and neural levels. Currently, he studies the impact of prediction error on subsequent memory and how aging influences this relationship. In his free time, Min Sung enjoys playing golf and tennis, and cooking.

Jennifer Fiedler | Google Scholar
jfiedler@unc.edu

Jenny was born and raised in Northern Virginia and completed her B.S. in Psychology at the College of William & Mary. At William & Mary, she worked in an Autobiographical memory lab on research projects investigating the effects of doodling on mind-wandering and later memory retrieval and completed her honors thesis on the self-reference effect. After graduation, she worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator at the A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Boston, where she used several neuroimaging techniques to evaluate the neural mechanisms behind attention and auditory working memory maintenance. Jenny is currently a 3rd year doctoral student in Cognitive Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying episodic memory updating with an emphasis on contextual reinstatement and subjective awareness of change. In her free time, Jenny enjoys rock climbing, hiking, and watching Premier League soccer.

Lindsay Howard
lchowar@unc.edu

Lindsay was born and raised in Maryland and completed her B.A. in Psychology at Gettysburg College. At Gettysburg College, she worked in a socio-emotional lab studying children’s’ sense of belonging and racial bias. She completed her behavioral neuroscience capstone on the effects of ketamine on anxiety in rats. After graduating, she worked in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University where she studied the pharmacokinetics as well as the cognitive effects associated with cannabis use. Through this work, she became interested in cognition and memory and pursued a coordinator position at the Division of Psychiatric Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University. During her time in the memory lab, she conducted various neuropsychological assessments on patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In addition, she collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data while patients completed a pattern separation task. Lindsay is currently a 1st year doctoral student in Cognitive Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she aims to study the effects of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance on the relational memory of healthy young adults. In her free time, Lindsay likes to go on runs, try different cuisines, and watch movies.

Research Assistants

Qingyang (Claire) Sun

Claire was born and raised in Jinan, China. She is now a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill majoring in Psychology and Neuroscience with a minor in Music. Claire’s interested research area includes cognitive psychology such as learning and memory, CPTSD, and studies with equipment measuring brain activities. In the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab, she mainly helps to recruit participants and run experiment sessions for context reactivation of memory study. In her free time, she enjoys playing music, cooking, and traveling.

Aliyaa Pathan

Aliyaa is an undergraduate student majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Chemistry. She’s interested in neuroscience as it relates to healthcare and is planning to pursue dentistry. At CNML, she assists with studies involving mind-wandering. In her free time, Aliyaa enjoys creative writing, reading, and, more recently, film photography.

Tianyu Gu

Tianyu was born and raised in Jiangsu, China. She came to the United States in 2021. After spending two years at Brandeis University, She transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill in 2023. Currently, Tianyu is a senior majoring in Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience. She is interested in cognitive and clinical psychology research. In the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab, she helps run experiments and related tasks for aging and memory. Tianyu enjoys cooking, traveling, hanging out with friends, and watching table tennis games.

Amanda Marrero Mayón

Amanda Marrero Mayón was born in Cuba and raised in Miami, FL. She earned her Associate of Arts in Chemistry from Miami Dade Honors College before transferring to UNC-Chapel Hill in 2024. Currently, Amanda is a sophomore majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Medical Anthropology. Her research interests focus on the impact of cognitive health on learning mechanisms. In the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab, she assists with experiments investigating mood congruency and memory in younger and older adults. Outside the lab, Amanda enjoys reading, photography, and practicing yoga.

Hunter Cole

Hunter was raised in Raleigh, NC. He was a psychology and biology major at UNC-Pembroke for two years where he helped with computational biology research on how synapses work. He transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill where he’s now a senior majoring in neuroscience. He’s interested in equipment measuring brain activities and he’s interested in the neural mechanisms behind memory encoding and updating. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, watching movies, and playing games with friends.

Maya Sivakumar

Maya Sivakumar is from Pittsburgh, PA. She is currently an undergraduate student at UNC -Chapel Hill majoring in neuroscience. She is interested in pursuing addiction research in terms of the predictors of substance use and its impact on memory. She also has a passion for programming and hopes to expand her knowledge of computational neuroscience and deep learning. In her free time, she enjoys running, dancing, and reading.

Jayda Hanson

Jayda was born and raised in Rapid City, South Dakota. She is a sophomore majoring in Neuroscience and Linguistics with a minor in Russian. She is interested in neurolinguistic research analyzing language deficits and cognition, particularly relating to various types of aphasia. In the lab, she is currently working on an aging study that investigates the effects of prediction errors (elicited when there is a discrepancy between predictions of an event and the actual event) on memory in aging. In her free time, her hobbies include hanging out with friends, designing tattoos, and building computers.

Lab Alumni

Aslihan Imamoglu, Ph.D.
Stephanie Langella, Ph.D.
Felipe De Brigard, Ph.D.
Ilana Dew, Ph.D.
Jaclyn Hennessey Ford, Ph.D.
Chris Foster, Ph.D.
So-Yeon Kim, Ph.D.
Will Moore, Ph.D.
Weichun Wang, Ph.D.
Eleanna Varangis, Ph.D.
A. Leslie Vaughan, Ph.D.

Collaborators

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lab Pets

Merlin & Momo

 

 

 

 

 

Lab Pet Alumni

Goliath