Research Projects

In this project, I investigated how trauma-exposed individuals respond to threatening information neurally and physiologically. I found that individuals who showed heightened threat-related activity in the hippocampus and stronger stress-related physiological responses reported more severe PTSD symptoms.

These findings suggest that disrupted hippocampal responses may serve as a biomarker for PTSD vulnerability, particularly in explaining the failure to distinguish between safety and threat. This impairment may lead individuals to generalize fear across safe and unsafe situations, increasing risk for chronic distress and maladaptive behavior.

Paper available here.

I developed a novel analytical method to track how distinct regions of the human brain co-reactivate specific memories during rest—a process known as neural replay. While animal studies use invasive recordings to show that memory-related regions replay information simultaneously, such analysis has been limited in humans. My approach overcomes this gap by detecting concurrent memory-specific reactivation across multiple brain regions, enabling us to map how networks interact during memory consolidation.

Using this method, we found that these HPC–FFA co-reactivations were associated with trials that were initially correctly recognized immediately after encoding but were later forgotten after 1-day and 1-week. These findings suggest that HPC–FFA co-reactivations may be integrating related events, at the expense of disrupting event-specific details, hence leading to forgetting.

Paper available here.