People | Cognitive Aging And

Meet the Team

Present Lab Members

Ayanna K. Thomas, PhD

Principal Investigator

Professor of Psychology at Tufts University, Dr. Thomas investigates the subjective experience that accompanies memories. Her research encompasses metacognition, memory distortion, eyewitness memory, and age related changes in memory. Dr. Thomas received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Washington, and then spent three years as an NIA postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She spent a final year at Washington University as a research scientist, studying changes in long-term memory as a function of aging. After teaching at Colby College for two years, Dr. Thomas came to the Department of Psychology at Tufts University, where she established the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab in 2007. Graduate and Undergraduate students interested in working in the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab should contact Ayanna for more information. Dr. Thomas’ research has been funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging and National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke, and has been featured in such popular media outlets as Psychology Today, The Initiative for Neuroscience and the Law, and the L.A. Times.

Lauren Mason

Lauren graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in Psychology and Holistic Health. During her time there, she worked in a Language Attention and Cognitive Engineering lab, where she conducted an honors thesis on autism traits, executive functions, and exercise. She also conducted research in a lab for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, where she studied the relationship between physiology and cognitive functioning, broadly. Currently, she is interested in the intersection between spatial cognition, metacognitive and self-regulatory strategies, and performance optimization. In the future, she looks forward to conducting research which advances the field and concurrently provides positive impacts for society.

Graduate Student

McKinzey Torrance

McKinzey earned her B.S. in Cognitive Brain Science from Tufts University. As an undergraduate student, her primary research interest was investigating mock eyewitnesses’ metacognitive abilities during memory encoding and retrieval. As a PhD student, she wants to continue her previous research and expand upon it to investigate mechanisms that could protect memory from misinformation either at encoding or during retrieval.

Graduate Student

Lan Anh Do

Graduate Student

Lan Anh (Bella) earned her B.A. in International Studies from Hanyang University and her M.A. in Educational Psychology from Yonsei University, South Korea. While at Yonsei, she studied the effects of several learning strategies that could make learning more effective such as interleaving and retrieval practice. At Tufts, she continues examining the impacts of research-based study techniques. Further, she investigates how the benefits of such techniques, if any, may vary according to different learning environments. Currently, another focus of her research is on collaborative learning and how collaboration can foster learning in stressful contexts.

Himanshu Chaudhary

Graduate Student

Himanshu earned his B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. During his time at UCLA and working as a lab manager at UC Davis, he worked on a multitude of projects ranging from scaffolding of memory in older adults to modeling learning in the brain using fMRI. Here at Tufts, he aims to continue his study of memory and the brain in older adults by looking for ways to tackle the cognitive deficits and susceptibility to misinformation that comes with growing older as well as pursue his interest in the effects of technology on cognition to produce research that can be applied to day-to-day life.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Jessica Karanian, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Fairfield University

Graduate Students

Alia Wulff, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Arizona State University

Renée DeCaro, Ph.D.
Gregory Hughes, Ph.D.
Leamarie Gordon, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Assumption College
Amy Smith, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Applied Brain and Cognitive Studies
Clinton Perry, Ph.D., User Experience Researcher, Citizen Bank
Bailey Bonura, M.S., M.D.
Stacey Dubois, M.S.

Undergraduate Students

2023 – Bryn Siegel (Honor's Thesis), Cameron Afza;

2016 – Mellissa (Rowan) Rice (Honor’s Thesis), Vivek Bilolikar (Honor’s Thesis), Taylor Hodhod (Honor’s Thesis) Danielle Sorcher, Reema Al-Marzoog, Alandra Champion
2015 – Alexander Siegel (Honors Thesis), Shoshana Oppenheim (Honors Thesis), Adrienne Lange, Christina Harvey (Honors Thesis)
2014 – Nishi Mehta (Honors Thesis), Paul Cernasov (Independent Project), Spencer Frank, (Independent Project)
2013 – Sarah Halloran, Alex Schmider, William Carroll (Honors Thesis), Charles Parsow (Independent Project), Darius Izadpanah, Michael Richard (Honors Thesis), Caroline Chen (Independent Project), Mark Westerfield
2011 – Nicholas Gang, Joe Nah, Shannon Robinson, Samia Zahran
2010 – Issa Baraka, Nicole LeBlanc, Peter Millar (Honors Thesis), Gina Sultan, Cara Wood
2009 – Tiffany Morton, Dominica Nino

Research Staff

Annika Allen, Graduate Student at Georgetown University

Aryan Pandey, Software Engineer at Microsoft

Former Lab Members