Opportunities for Graduate Students

Introduction

We try and give our graduate students maximal support in helping them develop a successful research career. There are multiple opportunities to first-author manuscripts based on both new data and data from prior research studies, and I strongly encourage this. We also try to provide financial support to our graduate students for presenting their findings at national and international conferences. Many of my graduate students have been successful in obtaining additional financial support from NIH in the form of predoctoral training grants. Our laboratory has collaborative links with the laboratories of other faculty (Laura Baker, Hanna Damasio, Antonio Damasio, Michael Dawson, Sarnoff Mednick) as well as with the nearby brain imaging center, and consequently there is the opportunity for students to broaden their research interests and experiences.

All graduate students contribute to the research activities in the laboratory, contributing about 12 hours per week on research that is usually directly linked to their MA and PhD research projects. We currently have 4 main research projects in which graduate students can become centrally involved. We welcome applicants to both the Psychology Ph.D. program (submit your application to the Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience sub-area of Psychology) as well as the Neuroscience Ph.D. program at USC.. Funding for our studies currently comes from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Areas of Interest

We focus on risk and protective factors for two main disorders--our "major" is violent / antisocial / psychopathic behavior and our "minor" is schizotypal personality / schizophrenia. We also study alcohol and drug use, and there is the potential to research other disorders such as depression as we have been collecting outcome on a wide range of psychopathology. Our research program encompasses adults, adolescents, children, and toddlers, and we have interests in both male and female antisocial behavior. Techniques we use in our research include structural and functional brain imaging, autonomic and central nervous system psychophysiology, neuroendocrinology, neuropsychology, behavioral genetics, and molecular genetics. We take a biosocial perspective to our investigation of psychopathology in which our end-goal is to integrate social and psychological processes with genetic and biological approaches to better understand antisocial and violent behavior.

 

Ethnic Minority Graduate Students

Our lab is particularly interested in recruiting students from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds because we collect data in multiple countries, including China and Africa (see below), and also have collaborations and research connections with scientists in Spain, Taiwan, Japan, England, Mexico, and Columbia. Because the data we collect covers multiple ethnic groups, students with some interest in ethnic issues could significantly contribute to our research activities.

Opportunities to publish and research skills acquisition

The multiple projects, some of which are longitudinal, are resulting in the collection of large amounts of data. In consequence, there are many opportunities for students to first-author multiple publications. Students can expect to learn a variety of research skills in these projects, including acquisition and analysis of both structural and funtional brain imaging, recording, analysis, and interpretation of CNS and ANS psychophysiological functions, hormone analysis, and neuropsychological assessment.