Dr. Kevin LaBar / Director
Send an Email »CV »
Dr. Kevin LaBar graduated Summa Cum Laude from Lafayette College, where he received
his B.A. in Mathematics and Psychology in 1990. In 1996, he completed his Ph.D. in Neural Science at New
York University's Center for Neural Science. From 1996-1997, he was a postdoctoral associate at Yale
University in the Department of Psychology. He served as Instructor in the Cognitive Neurology and
Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University Medical School from 1997-1999. In 1999, Dr. LaBar
joined Duke University as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in
2006, and again to Full Professor in 2010. His primary appointment is in the Department of Psychology &
Neuroscience and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He maintains a secondary appointment in the
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University Medical Center. He has received several
academic honors and awards, including the Scholar of the Year Award from the Lafayette College Alumni
Association, two Young Investigator Awards from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and
Depression, a Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the
Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and a CAREER award from the National
Science Foundation. He served as an Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral
Neuroscience from 2005-2007. He is currently the Head of the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program in
the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. Dr. LaBar's research is funded by the National Institutes of
Health and the National Science Foundation. His research uses neuroimaging, psychophysiological, and
behavioral methods to understand cognition-emotion interactions in the human brain. He has lectured on
topics in social and affective neuroscience as well as the cognitive neuroscience of learning and memory.
Daniel Parr / Student
Send an Email »
Daniel Parr is a PhD student in the Psychology and Neuroscience department. He
received a B.A. in Psychology from New College of Florida in 2019. After graduation, he worked as a lab
manager for the Developmental Personality Neuroscience Lab at Penn State and UNC-Chapel Hill. His research
investigates interactions between affect, reinforcement learning, and value-based decision-making.
Nimesha Gerlus / Student
Send an Email »
Nimesha Gerlus is an MD-PhD student in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience.
She received her B.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Brown University in 2017. After graduating, she worked
as a Post-baccalaureate Intramural Research Award (IRTA) trainee for the Experimental Therapeutics and
Pathophysiology Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health until starting at Duke’s Medical Scientist
Training Program in 2019. Nimesha is interested in studying how emotion dysregulation is represented in the
brain, as well as how treatments and strategies that improve emotion dysregulation affect the brain.
Lucas Bellaiche / Student
Send an Email »
Lucas Bellaiche is a Cognitive Neuroscience PhD candidate who entered the lab
through the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program (CNAP). Lucas is originally from Fayetteville,
Arkansas, and he obtained his undergrad degrees in psychology (BA) and statistics (BS) from the University
of Arkansas in his hometown. At Duke, Lucas is interested in interdisciplinary research at the intersection
of emotion and creativity, including how creative activities can drive emotion regulation, how art affords
emotional responses, and how emotion regulation can rely on outside-the-box thinking. In his free time,
Lucas likes to play music, travel, and seek brave volunteers to try his culinary creations.
Jane Rothrock / Student
Send an Email »
Jane Rothrock is a PhD student who entered through the Cognitive Neuroscience
Admitting Program. She graduated from Rutgers University in 2019 with a BA in Cognitive Science. She
then worked for two years as a Research Assistant in the Adaptive Memory Lab at Temple University, where
she studied functional network connectivity in people at-risk for psychosis. She is interested in using
behavioral and neuroimaging methods to study maladaptive episodic memory processes in clinical
populations.
Shanika Phillips Fullwood / Student
Send an Email »
Shanika is a Cognitive Neuroscience Ph.D. student who entered the lab
through
the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program (CNAP). She holds a bachelor's degree in Biology and a
master's degree in Speech-Language Pathology. Her clinical experiences as a medical speech-language
pathologist shape her research, which focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie
communication
changes after right-hemisphere stroke. She is particularly interested in how the brain processes
emotional prosody after right-hemisphere stroke and aims to bridge the gap between our scientific
understanding and clinical practice.
John Graner / Staff
Send an Email »
Dr. Graner's education and training is in medical image analysis. He
graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, MN with a BA in Physics in 2003 and then attended
graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, receiving a Ph.D. in Medical Physics in
2009. His graduate school research focused on the development of kinetic modeling methods for
various Positron Emission Tomography (PET) tracers. Immediately following graduate school Dr.
Graner
became a post-doctoral fellow with the National Capital Neuroimaging Consortium (NCNC) in
Bethesda,
MD. At the NCNC he worked on the analysis of task-related and resting state functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) data from active duty US military personnel with chronic symptomology
following exposure to traumatic brain injury (TBI). In 2011 Dr. Graner started as a research
scientist at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE) on the Walter Reed National
Military
Medical Center in Bethesda, continuing his work with fMRI and TBI. He joined the LaBar lab in
2014
and has been applying his experience with fMRI to the study of emotional processing, including
the
use of multivariate data analysis techniques to investigate related changes in brain activity
patterns. Dr. Graner is also currently collecting and analyzing the neuroimaging data associated
with the EMERALD project.
Rachael Wright / Staff
Send an Email »
Rachael Wright is a recently graduated Cognitive Neuroscience PhD
student
who entered through the
Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program (CNAP). She received her B.S. in Psychology
(Psychobiology
emphasis) from Santa Clara University in 2015. After graduation, she worked as a Clinical
Research
Coordinator in Dr. Amit Etkin's lab at Stanford University until coming to Duke in 2018. Now
jointly
advised
by Kevin LaBar and Alison Adcock, she studies questions at the intersection of affective
neuroscience and
learning.
Cody Triplett / Staff
Send an Email »
Cody Triplett obtained his B.A. in Psychology from Wake Forest
University in
May of 2022. In 2024 Cody graduated from Villanova University with his M.S. in Psychology, where
he investigated factors that impact age-related differences found in emotion recognition. He
joined the LaBar Lab in August 2024 as the laboratory manager. Cody is interested in the
interaction
between emotion and memory in the brain, and how this can change across different populations.