Our Graduate Students
Students in our Ph.D. program come from a wide range of backgrounds and work in a range of different domains within the brain and cognitive sciences, but all seek to understand behavior and how it depends on underlying mechanisms.
You can learn more about our body of outstanding students by browsing among their web pages. To make it easier to appreciate the variety of students' backgrounds and interests, we offer here snapshots of four who are at different stages in their careers, who came to the program with different backgrounds and expectations, and whose research falls in different parts of our domain.
Meghan Clayards is a fifth year graduate student studying the temporal integration of speech sounds during word recognition. She came to Rochester after earning a B.Sc. in Linguistics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
- "I chose BCS for three reasons. One reason was that I knew my experience here would involve a whole community of people who were interested in the study of language and speech. Over the years I've benefited from discussions and collaborations with many different people brought together by the Center for Language Sciences. The second was that I wanted to see the larger picture of language as a part of general cognition. The interdisciplinary nature of the BCS department has strongly influenced my research by exposing me to the study of perception and cognition in other domains. Thirdly, I wanted to work with the cutting edge techniques and technology used in the Tanenhaus eye tracking lab. These have provided me with an unprecedented methodology for the study of the temporal dynamics of speech."
Christopher Shawn Green is a fourth-year graduate student working on perceptual/motor learning in adults, particularly the effect of video game experience on perceptual and motor skills. He received a B.A. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester.
- "As an undergraduate, I was fortunate enough to be part of a lab investigating the effect of experience on perceptual skills with my senior thesis being on the effect of action video game experience on visual selective attention. I decided to stay in Rochester because it gave me the opportunity to continue investigating this unique topic. The diversity of the faculty has been a great asset in the endeavor as we've moved from low-level visual tasks such as contrast sensitivity to high-level cognitive tasks such as the Bechara gambling task, at each step have had the support of individuals who were particularly well-versed in the subject matter."
Vikranth Rao is a third-year graduate student, working on computational neuroscience of sensory perception under Dr. Alexandre Pouget. He came to Rochester with a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Buffalo.
- "I came to Rochester with the conviction that I would be gaining that training I wanted, in applying computational techniques to the study of the brain, while being part of an excellent department. This conviction has since been vindicated. What sets Rochester apart is the commitment everyone here has to training excellent scientists. In my time here I have always been treated as a peer, I have found nurturing support and guidance, I have found encouragement to leave no stone unturned in my training and I have truly felt like there is room here for me to convert my ideas and efforts into useful research. Anyone walking down the hallways of this department cannot help but notice the feeling of excitement there is about this place—for new ideas, for carrying out research, for academic discovery."