CARES Lab Members



Lab Director

Casey Brown, PhD

Principal Investigator

Email: caseylb54@gmail.com

Casey Brown is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience. She earned her PhD in clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, after completing her clinical internship at the University of California, San Francisco. Before graduate school, she served as the Project Coordinator of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and received her BA in psychology and cognitive science from the University of Virginia.

Casey’s research examines how we share, understand, and influence one another’s emotions. She’s interested in how these interpersonal emotional processes are beneficial for health, and how these processes go awry and contribute to depression. Her research uses an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach to inform and advance interventions that improve socio-emotional functioning. She works with individuals who have neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, as well as neurotypical individuals, and studies a number of different forms of social connections across the lifespan, with a particular focus on aging in dyads. Her work is currently funded by an R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Aging.

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Marlon Goering PhD

Post-Doctoral Associate

Email: mg2295@georgetown.edu

Marlon joined the CARES lab as a Postdoctoral Associate in September 2024. He earned his PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he worked in the Youth Development Lab. His research examines moral and prosocial development across the lifespan with a particular focus on the roles of moral identity and other-oriented emotions for emotional well-being and healthy aging. During graduate school, he also studied the concurrent and long-term effects of pubertal timing on behavioral and health outcomes from adolescence to adulthood. He is a member of the Association for Moral Education and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Graduate Students 

Neke Nsor

Neuroscience PhD Candidate

Email: nn396@georgetown.edu

Neke grew up in CA, where she attended undergrad at UC-Berkeley and earned a degree in psychology with a minor in disability studies. She then received her masters in neuroscience and education from Columbia University. She is a Phd candidate in the IPN program at Georgetown. Her research focuses on understanding the cognitive and non-cognitive symptoms of neurodegenerative disorders in high risk populations. When Neke is not in the lab, you can catch her at a museum or at a restaurant trying new foods.

Annika Allen

Psychology Graduate Student

Email: ama553@georgetown.edu

Annika graduated from William & Mary in 2022 with a B.S. in Psychology and in Kinesiology & Health Sciences. Before joining the CARES lab, she worked in the W&M Autism Lab and as a lab manager for the Cognitive Aging and Memory and Integrative Cognitive Neuroscience labs at Tufts University. As a graduate student on the LCN track, her research interests center around the impact that emotion and interoceptive processes have on social relationships and health, as well as methods to improve socio-emotional functioning across the lifespan.

Matthew Kiely 

Psychology Graduate Student

Email: mjk352@georgetown.edu

Matt graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2020 with a B.S. in Biological Sciences (General Biology) and a minor in Neuroscience. Before starting as an LCN student, he worked in the Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at UMD as an undergrad RA and as a postbac, the Magnetic Resonance Physics of Aging and Dementia Unit at the National Institute on Aging as a postbac, and the Lab for Neurodevelopment of Reading and Language at UMD as a project manager. He is interested in the neuroscience surrounding interpersonal relationships, empathy, and interactions in naturalistic contexts. 

Naama Zur

Neuroscience PhD Candidate

Email: nrz9@georgetown.edu

Naama is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Program for Neuroscience. She worked at the Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making in Prof. Zohar Eviatar’s laboratory at the University of Haifa where she completed her B.A. in Psychology and her M.A. in Cognitive Neuropsychology.  She continued to work in Prof. Eviatar’s laboratory as a Master’s degree student, working on an electroencephalograph (EEG) study investigating the effect of phonological representations on semantic processing. Her Master’s thesis, with her advisors, Prof. Eviatar and Prof. Avi Karni, utilized surface Electromyography (sEMG) on articulatory musculature to examine visual or auditory sentence presentation effects on muscle innervation in a sentence repetition task. Currently, Naama's research is focused on the role of the somatosensory cortex and empathy in vicarious social touch, where transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on somatosensory cortex, was applied on healthy individuals of varying degrees of state empathy, to test how emotional responses are affected during observation of positive social interactions. Outside the lab, Naama enjoys going to museums and concerts.

Affiliated Graduate Students

Chloe Casagrande

Neuroscience MD/PhD Student

Email: ccc162@georgetown.edu

Chloe graduated from Creighton University in 2020 with a B.S. in Neuroscience and minors in medical anthropology and biology. She continued her undergraduate research as a postbac analytical research assistant in Dr. Tony Wilson’s lab at the Institute for Human Neuroscience utilizing magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). She started her career at Georgetown in 2022 when beginning the MD/PhD program. Chloe will be working with Dr. Brown and Dr. Jeanne Mandelblatt to utilize neuroimaging, neuropsychology, and clinical metrics to understand the heterogeneity in neurocognitive aging among diseases such as dementia and cancer.

Lab Staff 

Anna Toledo

Post-Baccalaureate Research Fellow

Email: abt50@georgetown.edu

Anna graduated from Wake Forest University in 2023 with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Neuroscience.  She worked in a cognitive lab during her undergraduate studies, where she completed her Honors Thesis. Anna was awarded a Diversity Supplement from the National Institute on Aging, and will be working with Dr. Brown to investigate the effects of emotion regulation on the well-being and executive functioning of dementia caregivers. In her free time, Anna likes to do yoga, paint-by-numbers, and hang out with friends.

Nicholas Lohman 

Lab Manager

Email: nml65@georgetown.edu

Nicholas graduated from Georgetown University in 2024, where he pursued an interdisciplinary foreign service major, comprising culture, politics, and psychology. Nicholas was an undergraduate Research Assistant in Georgetown’s Culture and Emotions Lab, where he completed his honors thesis. Nicholas is interested in the relationship between social ties, emotion regulation, and psychological disorder outcomes. He is also intrigued by how community-wide processes impact psychological well-being.

Kleio Jiang

Lab Manager

Email: wj246@georgetown.edu

Kleio graduated with a B.A. from Vanderbilt University in 2023 with majors in Psychology and Cognitive Studies and minors in Data Science and Communication Studies. Before joining the CARES lab, she worked for a year as a Research Data Associate at NYU Medical School. She is interested in socio-cognitive psychology and the moral use of behavioral science for policy outcomes. You can find her exploring dc, at home petting her dog, and/or playing strategy board games. 

Research Assistants 

Gracie Rank

Chief Research Assistant

Gracie is a recent graduate of Georgetown, having majored in psychology and minored in computer science and business. She is interested in understanding human behavior and using psychology to make a positive impact in the world. In her free time, she enjoys reading, painting, doing puzzles and spending time with family. 


Maeve Pierson

Chief Research Assistant

Maeve is a senior at Georgetown from Boise, Idaho, studying psychology on the pre-med track. She hopes to pursue a career as a pediatrician and loves to cook, run, ski, travel and listen to “nerdy psychology podcasts” in her free time.  


Shreya Vasant

Chief Research Assistant

Shreya is a senior at Purdue University double majoring in Brain and Behavioral Sciences and Applied Statistics. She is interested in getting a PhD in developmental psychology. In her free time, she enjoys reading, knitting, and dancing.

Colin Cox

Senior Research Assistant

Cece Peacock

Senior Research Assistant

Sebastian Thomas

Senior Research Assistant

Vineet Sekhon

Senior Research Assistant

Olivia Williamson

Research Assistant

Ava Joulapour

Research Assistant

Kriti Mukherjee

Research Assistant

Emy Yamamoto

Research Assistant

Sophia Samson

Research Assistant

Victoria Kucaba

Research Assistant

Demetra Tudorache

Research Assistant, George Mason University

Grace Lavin

Research Assistant

Brittany Lessin

Research Assistant

Isabel Estes

Research Assistant

Natalie Kloster

Research Assistant

Taylor Onyinanya

Research Assistant

Kaavya  Borra

Thomas Jefferson HS Mentorship Fellow

Myra Clark

Thomas Jefferson HS Mentorship Fellow

Nishita Paruchuri

High School Research Assistant

Kendall Venegas

High School Research Assistant

Jitsu Marupudi

High School Research Assistant

Leena Mansur

High School Research Assistant

Nishka Heggade

High School Research Assistant

Angela Rios

High School Research Assistant

Brinda Patel

High School Research Assistant

Lab Alumni

Navya Yarrabothula

Former Lab Manager

Currently working in Industry

Hannah Cozad

Former Lab Manager

Current graduate student in clinical psychology


Eli Kales

Former Associate Lab Manager

Current Psychology Research Coordinator at Perelman School of Medicine

Pierson Cohen

Former Senior Research Assistant

Recent graduate of Georgetown University

Nathaniel Drexler

Former Senior Research Assistant

Current Psychology Research Coordinator at Uniformed Services University

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