Program Faculty + Staff
Creativity & Gifted Education Professor, Director, Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development
Research Interests: Creativity and the human imagination, mental time travel, mental state reasoning, self-referential cognition, social cognition, consciousness, aesthetic engagement
Deborah Barany
Assistant Professor, Kinesiology and AU/UGA Medical Partnership
Research Interests: Neural mechanisms of goal-directed movement, functional neuroimaging, non-invasive brain stimulation, neurorehabilitation
Abigail Butcher
NSURE Program Coordinator
Jarrod Call
Assistant Professor, Kinesiology (Exercise Science Programs)
Research Interests: Skeletal muscle physiology, mitochondrial physiology, regenerative medicine, muscle electrophysiology
Adriana Copley
NSURE Program Assistant
Jonathan Eggenschwiler
Associate Professor, Genetics
Research Interests: Genetic analysis of mouse development, cell fate specification in the embryonic central nervous system, patterning of the body plan’s left-right axis
Nick Filipov
Professor, Physiology and Pharmacology
Research Interests: Neurotoxicology, neuroimmunology, communication of the nervous systems in health and disease, basal ganglia disorders
Lohitash Karumbaiah
Associate Professor of Regenerative Medicine, Regenerative Bioscience Center, Animal and Dairy Science
Research Interests: Defects in carbohydrate biosynthesis and alterations in carbohydrate composition, development of new carbohydrate-based biomaterials for spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and neural interfacing applications
James Lauderdale
NSURE PI
Research Interests: Cells and disease, cells in development
Sheba MohanKumar
Associate Professor, Veterinary Biosciences and Diagnostic Imaging
Research Interests: Neuroendocrine immune interactions in the context of reproduction and stress, prenatal stress and programming of obesity, environmental exposures and their impact on stress and reproduction, biomarker development for various human diseases
Emily Noble
Assistant Professor, Foods and Nutrition
Research Interests: Feeding behavior, physical activity, energy expenditure, mechanisms by which diet and exercise affect the brain and cognitive function
Assaf Oshri
Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Science
Research Interests: Children and youth well-being and resilience, understanding youth development using multi-method (observation, surveys, neuroimaging, stress physiology) and multi-level research (e.g., individual cognition, personality, family, peer, and neighborhood environments), mechanisms that underlie the link between early life stress in childhood (e.g., child maltreatment, poverty, cultural stress) and adolescent behavioral risk (e.g. substance use and sexual risk behaviors) and resilience
Ramana Pidaparti
Professor, Royal Aeronautical Society Fellow
Research Interests: design engineering and innovation, computational mechanics, drug delivery devices, STEM education
Jesse Schank
Assistant Professor, Neuroscience; Physiology & Pharmacology
Research Interests: The role of stress and neuropeptides in drug-seeking behavior using behavioral pharmacology, neuroanatomy, and molecular neuroscience.
Frank West
Associate Professor, Neuroscience, Regenerative Medicine
Research Interests: Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide. We explore the potential of neural stem cells and other regenerative therapies to recover lost and damaged brain tissue. We utilize a novel pig ischemic stroke model in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging, cognitive, motor function testing and histology.
Jing Xu
Associate Professor, Cognition and Dexterity (CoDex) Lab
Research Interests: Understanding how humans learn complex motor skills, how skills are maintained across age, how to restore them after neuromuscular injuries; identifying behavioral, cognitive, and neural components essential for hand dexterous function; deriving learning and control principles that support the acquisition and production of dexterous movement; exploring factors that influence rehabilitation; long-term goal is designing effective therapies to help patients regain their motor skills