Lily defended her dissertation on Monday, May 23, 2022! In the last five years, she has obtained an M.A. in Geography, M.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience, and now a Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences with a concentration in Cognitive Neuroscience. She’ll soon be starting at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital as a Postdoc Research Fellow with Dr. Sudeshna Das. The lab and friends celebrated her accomplishments in the CNLM Courtyard with lots of good food and cake to celebrate. Congrats, Lily!

Daniela Cossio was recently named a 2022 Faculty Mentor Program Fellow by the UCI Graduate Division! The Faculty Mentor Program (FMP) Fellowship is designed to increase the number of students who complete their Ph.D. degrees and successfully acquire a faculty appointment. Fellows are expected to participate in meaningful research and, eventually, develop an independent project. The fellowship provides one year of financial support and an additional travel award stipend. Well deserved, Daniela!

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)’s Symposium is an annual symposium at which UCI undergrads present their research and network with others. For the first time since 2019, this event took place on campus, and three research assistants from the Chrastil Lab gave poster presentations at this symposium. The building was full of students, staff, and faculty from varying campus departments, and this event featured the amazing work of so many students.

Vicky Rao created her poster on Contrasting Turns and Metric Distance in Topological Space and co-presented it with Luke Chi.

Pictured (left to right): Vicky Rao and Luke Chi

Sundas Shaikh presented on the Impact of Spatial Exploration Patterns on Spatial Navigation Ability in Young Adults.

Pictured: Sundas Shaikh

Alina flew out to San Fransisco, California to attend the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS)’s 4-day Annual Meeting in late April 2022. She gave a poster presentation with updates to her work on the relationship between hippocampal subfield volumes and individual differences in navigation and came back with a lab-wide presentation recapping her experience at her first conference!

The Chrastil lab was awarded a $2.5 million dollar R01 grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) for a project called “Navigational learning and memory: Cognitive graphs, active decision making, and brain network dynamics”. We’ll be working with co-Investigators Aaron Bornstein (UCI) and Jean Carlson (UCSB) to understand more about the structure of spatial knowledge and how we learn it.

Theo Kapogianis worked as a rotational graduate student in the Chrastil Lab in Fall Quarter 2021 and has now officially joined as a second-year grad student! He’s currently working on his non-spatial navigational learning paradigm to better understand how humans learn to navigate between abstract objects. We are excited to have him join the group – please join us in welcoming him.

The Irvine Brain Bee is an annual competition hosted by the CNLM to test high school students on their knowledge of neuroscience. This year, it was held in person on the UC Irvine campus for the first time in two years, and many of the CNLM Ambassadors in the K-12 Committee volunteered their time to facilitate this event, including lab members Alina and Daniela.

Pictured (left to right): Liz, Daniela, and Alina. Photo from Daniela Cossio.

Throughout this day-long event, both Alina and Daniela organized the check-in process for the Brain Bee participants, shared their undergrad (and graduate) experiences with the high school students, and taught them about visual illusions during the activities portion of the day.

Pictured: Liz during her keynote talk. Photo from Joshua Nguyen.

Liz was also invited as the keynote speaker for the 2022 Irvine Brain Bee, where she explained her work on individual differences in human spatial navigation. It’s always inspiring to see so many students passionate about the brain. What a successful day!

This past weekend, members of our lab trekked a 4-mile hike on the Shady Canyon Trail, located less than 10-minutes away from the UC Irvine campus. Sunny weather, fresh air, morning exercise, insightful conversations… what nicer way is there to spend a Saturday morning?

Top (left to right): Mike, Vaisakh, Liz, and Olivia. Bottom (left to right): Theo, Alina, Nikki, and Daniela. Dogs (left to right): Pepper and Dash

Congratulations to postdoc Mike Starrett Ambrose, who was appointed to the UCI Training in Translational ADRD Neuroscience (TITAN) T32 training grant. As a trainee funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Aging (NIA), Mike will learn about current models of and research into Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) while also conducting independent ADRD research in the Spatial Neuroscience Lab.

Chrastil Lab publishes paper, “Understanding differences in wayfinding strategies,” in Topics in Cognitive Science (2021).

Authors: Hegarty, M., He, C., Boone, A. P., Yu, S., Jacobs, E. G., & Chrastil, E. R.