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 AssistantCece Peacock
Senior Research AssistantSebastian Thomas
Senior Research AssistantVineet Sekhon
Senior Research AssistantOlivia Williamson
Research AssistantAva Joulapour
Research AssistantKriti Mukherjee
Research AssistantEmy Yamamoto
Research AssistantSophia Samson
Research AssistantVictoria Kucaba
Research AssistantDemetra Tudorache
Research Assistant, George Mason UniversityGrace Lavin
Research AssistantBrittany Lessin
Research AssistantIsabel Estes
Research AssistantNatalie Kloster
Research AssistantTaylor Onyinanya
Research AssistantKaavya Borra
Thomas Jefferson HS Mentorship FellowMyra Clark
Thomas Jefferson HS Mentorship FellowNishita Paruchuri
High School Research AssistantKendall Venegas
High School Research AssistantJitsu Marupudi
High School Research AssistantLeena Mansur
High School Research AssistantNishka Heggade
High School Research AssistantAngela Rios
High School Research AssistantBrinda Patel
High School Research AssistantLab 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