Avram J. Holmes
Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research
Rutgers University
119 Staged Research Building
661 Hoes Lane West
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Dr. Holmes is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers University, affiliated with the Brain Health Institute, the Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research, the Rutgers Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (RAD) Collaboratory, and the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and Latent Cause Inference Conte Center. Trained in clinical psychology and systems neuroscience, he studies the fundamental organization of large-scale human brain networks, with a particular focus on higher-level cognition and the intersection of emotion and cognition in psychiatric illness.
Kaley Joss
Department of Psychiatry
Rutgers University
119 Staged Research Building
661 Hoes Lane West
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Kaley completed her bachelor’s in economics at the University of Washington, where she studied network economics under Dr. Alan Griffiths. At the Holmes Lab her research interests include building network-based models to analyze and characterize the time-varying patterns of brain connectivity that underlie individual differences in behavior.
Alexandra Daube
Department of Psychiatry
Rutgers University
119 Staged Research Building
661 Hoes Lane West
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Alex completed her bachelors of science in Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology at Emory University in 2025. While at Emory she worked under Dr. Negar Fani studying mind-body based interventions to treat PTSD in racially and economically marginalized populations. Alex is interested in multi-methodological approaches to clinical psychology and predictive modeling to better understand risk, changes in symptoms, and more effective treatments for psychiatric illnesses.
Carrisa Cocuzza earned her PhD in Neuroscience at Rutgers University (NJ, USA) in 2022 under the advisement of Dr. Michael W. Cole. Her dissertation examined the extent that brain-network-based mechanisms can explain local and distributed processes, including visual category selectivity and cognitive control. She is interested in building on this work to assess how network architectures and dynamics are altered across dimensional symptom profiles in patients diagnosed with psychotic and affective disorders. Carrisa plans to incorporate computational approaches from machine learning and network control theory, along with multivariate sources of biological and behavioral data, to build mechanistically-informed models of transdiagnostic neurocognitive deficits.
Loïc Labache
Department of Psychiatry
Rutgers University
119 Staged Research Building
661 Hoes Lane West
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Loïc Labache earned his BSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Bordeaux (2014) and his MSc in Cognitive Engineering from the Institut National Polytechnique de Bordeaux (2017). Prior to joining Yale University, he got his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (2020). His dissertation research focused on the elaboration of brain network atlases underpinning lateralized cognitive functions, with a particular emphasis on the study of inter-individual variability of language. He is interested in the link between resting-state and task-induced brain activity, as well as anatomo-functional bases of lateralized brain networks. His work will focus on the nested organization of cerebral networks, their dynamics and characteristics.
Ashlea Segal
Department of Psychology
413 Sheffield Sterling Strathcona Hall
1 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Ashlea is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wu-Tsai Institute working with Professors Avram Holmes (Psychology) and Nenad Sestan (Neuroscience). Ashlea completed her PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at the Turner Institute of Brain and Mental Health at Monash University (2023) in Melbourne, Australia under the supervision of Professor Alex Fornito. Ashlea’s PhD focused on mapping brain differences in psychiatric disorders across multiple spatial scales. She is interested in understanding how brain organization serves as bridge between one’s genes and one’s cognitive and behavioral processes, with a particular focus on individual neural variability in the context of psychiatric disorders.
Amber Howell
Department of Psychiatry
Rutgers University
119 Staged Research Building
661 Hoes Lane West
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Amber is a postdoctoral fellow co-mentored by Linden Parkes and Avram Holmes at CAHBIR. Amber completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, she was a research assistant at UC-Davis and Stanford University. She then completed her graduate studies at Yale University, where her dissertation work focused on thalamocortical circuitry in human and non-human primates. Amber is interested in how dynamic brain interactions arise from the structural architecture of the brain and how they are shaped by subcortical circuitry, using empirical and computational tools to bridge scales of analysis and integrate findings across species. Furthermore, she is interested in how dynamic brain patterns vary across individuals and how they relate to flexible cognition and behavior in typically and atypically-developing individuals.<
Rachel Cooper
Department of Psychiatry
Rutgers University
119 Staged Research Building
661 Hoes Lane West
Piscataway, NJ 08854
Rachel Cooper earned her PhD in Physics from Yale University in 2025. Her dissertation focused on large-scale, individual-level biophysical modelling of the functional connectivity of the human cortex. She earned bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Mathematics from Clarion University of Pennsylvania (now Pennsylvania Western University, Clarion) in 2014. She is interested in using biologically-plausible modelling approaches to bridge across spatial scales, such as how interactions between simple synapse-level excitatory and inhibitory processes manifest into a wide array of complex relationships and behaviors. She hopes to use insights from biophysical models to better understand the mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders.
Xihan Zhang
Department of Psychology
413 Sheffield Sterling Strathcona Hall
1 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Xihan is a doctoral student in the Yale department of Psychology. She graduated from Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health with a Master’s in Public Health in 2019. She works on computational biology, neuroscience, affective dynamics and mechanisms of change.
Yueyue (Lydia) Qu is a fifth-year PhD student in the department of psychology. She earned her BA in Psychology and Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2021. As an undergraduate, she worked with Drs Ryan Bogdan and Deanna Barch on projects exploring baseline correlates of psychopathology including depression, substance use and ADHD in the ABCD study. In her first two years at Yale, her work with Dr. Avram Holmes utilized predictive modeling to uncover distinct network predictors of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology in the ABCD study. She is interested in how exposures to specific major life stressor features shape the development of different types of self-schemas which are associated with symptom heterogeneity across individuals in mood disorders and PTSD.
Justin Baker – McLean Hospital
Randy Buckner – Harvard University
Danilo Bzdok – McGill University
Elvisha Dhamala – Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
Thomas Yeo – National University of Singapore
Xi-Nian Zuo – Beijing Normal University
