Alicia Adams
At Brown University Alicia concentrated in Human Biology with a focus on human health and disease. She was a member of the Britton Lab in 2009 – 2010. Her research exploredthe physiological manifestations of psychological trauma and looks specifically at the adult neuroendocrine effects of childhood trauma.
Alicia was also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Her research through the Mellon program focused on social inequalities and how they relate to health inequalities. She is very interested in exploring stress-related biological mechanisms that influence disease outcomes and bridging the gap between the social and biological sciences.
When Alicia is not involved with research, she can probably be found spending time with her awesome husband, missing her incredible family back home, or baking with the lovely lab manager. She feels truly grateful to have been part of the amazing learning environment created by Dr. Britton and for the wonderful friends that came along with it.
Richa Bhatnagar
Richa graduated from Brown University in 2009 with a degree in Human Biology. She is working for the Art of Living Foundation, teaching YES+ (Yoga- Empowerment-Service) courses in universities around the US and on the Foundation’s national youth projects. Richa worked in the Britton Lab from 08-09 and had a great time! She worked mostly on the Moses Brown project.
Maria Capecelatro
Maria first joined the Britton lab in April of 2009 while a junior at Brown University. She was very involved in neuropsychological testing for the MedLabs study, running dozens of participants and serving as a Head Examiner. Her coursework centered on the brain and human behavior and culminated in a senior capstone project entitled “Sex and Chocolate: Spontaneous Word Use in Depression-Related Brain Function.” With Dr. Britton as her advisor, she used a text-analysis program to explore how depression affects conversation content concerning images of food, sexual activity and people. An abstract from her research was accepted to the World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies and to the International Congress of Behavioral Medicine. She hopes to publish a manuscript on her project soon. After completing her Sc.B. in May of 2010, Maria worked as the Lab Manager of Britton Lab up until May of 2011. She oversaw the completion of the MedLabs study and assisted other lab members with their senior projects.
Currently, Maria is working as a research assistant in the lab of Dr. James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. In collaboration with Jenna Baddeley, her current research project is exploring how negative emotional disclosures differ between depressed and non-depressed individuals, in terms of the type and frequency of disclosures and the responses that the disclosures receive. Maria has also cleaned email files from the Sarah Palin corpus. This Fall, she will be running participants for a study aimed at developing a reading guide for students in introductory psychology. She hopes to apply to graduate programs next Fall that are in line with her interests in depression, anhedonia, language and psychosomatics.
Jonathon Chou
Jonathan Chou is an undergraduate at Brown University studying English Literatures and Languages. He is interested especially in postmodern and romantic movements. After Brown, he plans to pursue a medical degree and practice somewhere abroad or not. He contemplates a complementary and alternative medicine approach hand in hand with a western medicine-driven practice.
Jonathan has worked in the Britton lab since January of 2011, focusing primarily on the Dark Night study about the adverse effects of meditation. Though he is only beginning his own contemplative practice, Jonathan is interested in offering what enthusiasm and support he can to supporting those who seek help and spreading awareness about contemplative practice.
Outside the lab, Jonathan takes pleasure in the literary arts and coffee shop retreats.
Renée Grinnell
Soon after graduating from Cornell University in 2008, Renée was fortunate enough to find her way to Providence and the Britton Lab! She worked on the MEDLABS and Moses Brown studies from October 2008 to July 2009, serving first as a research assistant and then as lab manager. She spent the next two years as a full-time RA at Butler Hospital in the Psychosocial Research Program, and is now a first-year clinical psychology doctoral student at Virginia Commonwealth University concentrating in adult behavioral medicine. Her research interests center around the development and dissemination of brief, low-cost preventative mental health interventions, particularly in the primary care setting. Renée is also very interested in the effect(s) of religiosity on mental health treatment-seeking behaviors.
MariaLisa Itzoe
As an undergraduate at Brown University, MariaLisa Itzoe double concentrated in Music, with a focus in Ethnomusicology, and Psychology (specifically, neuropsychology). A native of Baltimore, MD she discovered a passion for music at a young age and continued musical involvement throughout her college career by singing in the Brown Chorus and playing the harp in the Brown Orchestra as well as the Applied Music Program. She also served as President for Brown’s Chapter of The Triple Helix, which publishes bi-annually the journal, “The Science in Society Review: The International Journal of Science, Society, and Law.” First established at Cornell in 2004, the TTH international organization continually seeks to examine the connections between the humanities and sciences.
Over the course of her college career, MariaLisa developed an interest in studying the effects of music on emotion/affect and cognitive performance – a topic she pursued for her honors thesis. In her three years working as a Research Assistant in the lab of Dr. Willoughby Britton she also explored the way in which both meditation and music could be successfully applied in a medical setting and be integrated into therapy for patients with neurological/psychological disorders. MariaLisa was involved most directly in Dr. Britton’s Moses Brown study and the MedLabs study. Her responsibilities included test administration, data collection/entry, and creation of individualized feedback graphs for MedLabs participants. This allowed students to see their neuropsychological changes across the semester (from baseline to exit testing) and to visualize how meditation may or may not affected them across a variety of neuropsychological factors.
After graduating from Brown in May 2012, MariaLisa will participate in a one-year post-baccalaureate pre-medical school program at Goucher College before applying to
medical school.
Nathaniel Lepp
Nathaniel earned a Sc.B. in neuroscience and a M.P.H. from Brown University and is currently pursuing an M.D. at New York Medical College. Nathaniel is a co-Investigator for the Moses Brown and the MedLabs studies. His research was inspired by and workshoped at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute in 2007, 2008, and 2010. In 2009, Nathaniel was awarded a Francisco J. Varela Research Award to support the Moses Brown and MedLabs research. His master’s thesis reported the results of a randomized, waitlist-controlled study of a six-week school-based mental health. In 2008 and 2009, the Moses Brown study awarded 1st Prize Graduate Research Poster Presentation at Brown’s Public Health Research Day.
Alongside his research, Nathaniel honed skills in coalition building, policy analysis and political communication. Between 2003 and 2008, he supported successful legislative and constitutional efforts in the Rhode Island General Assembly. He is also a member of the Ethics, Professionalism, and Human Rights Committee and the Council of Student Members of the American College of Physicians. In 2011, Nathaniel was awarded a National Quality Scholarship by the American College of Medical Quality. Nathaniel is principally interested in cultivating leadership to re-design the practice of medicine around the triple aim of improved quality, enhanced patient and provider satisfaction and decreased costs. Nathaniel was born and raised in New Rochelle, NY and currently lives with his wife in New York City.
Ben McKenna
Ben is currently a 5th year graduate student in the SDSU/UCSD Joint Docotral Program studying clinical neuropsychology. He works with Dr. Sean Drummond examining cognition and sleep deprivation with a focus in better understanding memory, the brain, and sleep. Ben’s disseration is examining the neural substrates for the components of working memory (e.g. attention and rehearsal span processes) and how these components are differentially affected by sleep loss. To do this, Ben is using a fast event-related fMRI paradigm with validated tasks that isolate these components with subjects when they are well rested and following 36 hours of total sleep deprivation.
Additionally, Ben’s clinical focus is on neurodegenerative diseases, traumatic brain injuries, and stokes. He sees patients with brain damage and assess their cognitve facilites with comprehensive neuropsychological batteries to determine the etiology and/or treatment plans.
In the BrittonLab, Ben helped Dr. Britton run her MBDRP study at University of Arizona working with almost all aspects of her study at some point in time.
Tucker Peck
Tucker graduated with a BA the Brown Psychology Department in 2005, writing his honors thesis on emotionality in adolescent children of alcoholics with Professor Mary Carskadon. He then worked in Willoughby’s lab, studying the reporting of meditation “dosage” in the literature, as well as the effect of dosage in meditation as an insomnia therapy. Tucker is now a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at the University of Arizona, where he studies the effects of meditation on sleep with Professor Dick Bootzin, who was also Will’s advisor. Tucker has been to all but 2 US states and all but 2 Canadian provinces, and he’s adopting a Border Collie this summer and considering naming his dog Phineas Gage.
Doug Roberts-Wolfe
While at the Britton Lab, Doug looked at emotional word recall (an objective measure of psychological well being and distress) comparing changes on this measure in contemplative practitioners and musicians. Doug is enrolled in the md/phd program at the Medical University of South Carolina where he will most likely be researching the neuroscience of addiction.
Tom Rocha
Tom worked in the Britton lab from 2009 through 2011. Tom coded data and wrote syntax for a number of Dr. Britton’s projects, and helped to recruit, manage, and run study participants for the Medlabs study. Tom worked most closely with the Moses Brown data, and wrote his senior thesis on the theory and practice of contemplative education in American K-12 schools. The thesis received the Reginald Archambault Award for best honors thesis in the Education Department for the graduating class of 2011. This work also contained one of the first analyses of the Moses Brown study, exploring changes in depression and anxiety in 6th graders after a mindfulness meditation intervention.
Tom is currently completing an M.Phil. in Psychology and Education at the University of Cambridge, studying further the effects of the meditation intervention on the Moses Brown participants. Aside from his academic work in the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of contemplative practice, Tom is also interested in studying philosophy of mind, queer youth development, and human rights law.
Matt Sacchet
Matthew graduated from Brown University with an independent Bachelor of Science. His coursework was primarily drawn from biology, chemistry, cognitive science, mathematics, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. During his time at Brown, Matthew worked in several research labs, was involved with the Contemplative Studies Initiative, Cheetah House and Brown Zen Community, and worked and volunteered at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. He also interned, studied, volunteered, taught, and researched abroad (Bangladesh, India, Switzerland, Thailand). Since graduating, Matthew has been a research assistant with several groups in the Boston area and Germany; in fall 2011 he will begin a doctoral program in neuroscience at Stanford.
Zach Schlosser
Zach graduated from Brown University in December of 2010, having concentrated in religious studies with particular focus on early Buddhist philosophy, philosophy of mysticism, and comparative contemplative methodology. His undergraduate thesis examined ambiguities in the conception of dukkha (“suffering”) in the Visuddhimagga. Never merely an intellectual engagement, Zach’s undergraduate career was a full throttle investigation of contemplative practice and embodied awakening, meandering through Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada systems, and including a six month, full-time, solitary shamatha meditation retreat. His current primary practice is with a contemporary, Western school of contemplation called Waking Down in Mutuality. Zach has facilitated several small community meditation groups for students, senior citizens, the formerly incarcerated, and staff of non-profit organizations, and has worked as an independent research consultant. Zach now works as a contemplative mentor, a “Spiritual Big Buddy.” The fundamental basis of this work is an unwavering trust in each mentee, and its methods include the encouragement of mentees’ own existential wonder, fulfillment, and personal expression. His website is http://www.adeeplife.com/. Zach now lives in Berkeley, California and can be contacted at zacharyschlosser@gmail.com.
Aliyah Sheth
Aliyah went to University of Arizona for her undergraduate studies, during which
she worked in Willoughby’s lab. She helped with the MBDRP project from 2004 to
2007. Currently, she anticiplates graduating from the University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy in 2010 with a Pharm.D. degree and plans on continuing on
to get her Ph.D. in pharmaceutics. Her current research primarily centers
around preformulation of medications and sustained-release pulmonary delivery
systems.
R. Gina Silverstein
Gina graduated from Brown University in 2009 with a BA in Religious Studies and Human Biology. Clearly working in the Britton Lab was an ideal way to bring together these seemingly disparate disciplines and became an important center of her Brown experience. While in the lab Gina was involved in many projects and served as the Lab Manager for a year. Her main focus was looking at the role of mindfulness in healthy sexual functioning in women. Her manuscript on the subject, entitled Effects of Mindfulness Training on Body Awareness to Sexual Stimuli: Implications for Female Sexual Dysfunction will be printed in the Journal Of Psychosomatic Medicine.
Currently, Gina lives in Denver, working as a project manager for CiviCore, a software company that makes databases for non-profits, as well as doing some independent technology consulting. Her background contains a little bit of everything– from farming to communications, from the music industry to heath education. Who knows what will be next! Outside of work, she is busy enjoying the music scene, mountains, sunshine and snow of Colorado.
