Principal Investigator of SEAL Lab

Chad M. Sylvester, MD, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry

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Department of Psychiatry profile: https://psychiatry.wustl.edu/people/chad-sylvester-md-phd/

Dr. Sylvester is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine. He completed M.D. and Ph.D. (neuroscience) degrees in 2009, a general residency in psychiatry in 2012, and a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry in 2014, all at Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Sylvester uses computer games and neuroimaging to study attention in youth with anxiety disorders.

Faculty

Maria Catalina Camacho, PhD

Assistant Professor

Cat Camacho is a Assistant Professor in the lab. Cat completed her PhD in Neurosciences at WashU in 2022 and her BA in Psychology at Stanford in 2014. Cat studies the neurodevelopment that underlies emotion processing with the larger goal of understanding how socio-emotional dysfunctions associated with anxiety and depression come about. Outside of research, Cat enjoys board games, watching movies, drawing, and cooking. https://www.catcamacho.net/

Michael Perino, PhD

Assistant Professor

Michael is an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine. He completed his PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018, where he studied socioaffective processing in externalizing adolescents. He uses computer games and fMRI to study emotion processing and moral decision-making.

Rebecca Schwarzlose, PhD

Assistant Professor

Rebecca Schwarzlose is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis and Director of the Sensory Questions in Development (SQUID) Lab. She studies the role of sensation in neurodevelopment, with a particular focus on the neural underpinnings of sensory over-responsivity. This work seeks to characterize neural circuits and mechanisms involved in sensory over-responsivity and understand their relevance to neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions of childhood, particularly autism and anxiety disorders.

Post Doctoral Researcher

Max Herzberg, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Research Associate

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Max Herzberg is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine. He completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology at Grinnell College and received a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Herzberg’s research is focused on the neural mediators of the relationship between early adversity and the development of psychopathology during two developmental periods of rapid change: infancy and adolescence.

Carolyn Lasch, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Scholar

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Carolyn Lasch completed her doctorate in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at University of Minnesota- Twin Cities, where her dissertation used eye tracking to study how early social attention and temperament are reflected in brain development in infants and toddlers. She completed her clinical internship at Emory University’s Marcus Autism Center. Her postdoctoral work focuses on the brain correlates of social attention development in typically developing infants as well as children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and Down syndrome.  

Staff

Ramone Agard, BS

Programmer

 This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Ramone-pic-1.pngRamone Agard is a Saint Louis native and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. He assists the lab with constructing processing pipelines for fMRI data, as well as developing software for experimental tasks. Ramone collaborates with numerous studies in the SEAL lab to ensure technological needs are fulfilled. 

Emily Bax, BA, BFA

Professional Rater

Emily comes to SEAL lab with years of experience in clinic and mental health settings here in St. Louis. She has worked with adolescents at a youth center that provided social, medical and mental health services and as an intake specialist for a mental health organization.

Emily currently conducts participant sessions including fMRI, EEG with eye tracking, and behavioral assessments for both infants and adolescents.

Victoria Brooks, LCSW

Clinical Research Coordinator

Victoria is a graduate from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s in Social Work. She became clinically licensed in Social Work in 2017 and has previously worked at the Early Emotional Development Program at Washington University conducting behavioral assessments for teens and their caregivers.

Gabriella M Kellerman, BA

Professional Rater

Gabriella graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelors in This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Photo-and-childhood.jpg Psychology. She has experience working with adolescents and adults independently in schools and as a crisis counselor on the 988 national suicide hotline. Gabriella currently assists Dr. Sylvester’s lab on Anxiety and ADHD studies that include conducting participant EEG with eye tracking sessions, fMRIs, and behavioral assessments for both infants and adolescents.

 

Shelby Kessler, BS

Clinical Research Coordinator

Shelby graduated from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville with a B.S. in Psychology, as well as a minor in Women’s Studies. Shelby has experience in working with adolescents and adults in multiple settings such as residential, hospitals, and youth centers. Shelby currently coordinates multiple studies.

Christina Luo, MA

Professional Rater

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Untitled-design.jpgChristina (Hexin) is from Chengdu, China, and holds a B.A. in Psychology and Communication from UC Davis. She recently completed her M.S. in Applied Health and Behavior Research at Washington University School of Medicine and currently works as a professional rater at the SEAL lab.  She is experienced in conducting neuroimaging and behavioral sessions with children and adolescents. She is looking forward to studying the neurodevelopment of emotions and executive functions and their relationship to socio-emotional functioning in graduate school.

Christina is currently helping with participant sessions including fMRI, EEG with eye tracking, and behavioral assessments for both infants and adolescents

Molly Mendoza, LCSW

Clinical Research Coordinator

Molly Mendoza is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Master of Social Work from Colorado State University.

Molly coordinates the Attention in Anxiety & ADHD (AAA) study which aims to characterize how attention-related brain circuits are altered in pediatric anxiety & ADHD. She conducts clinical interviews and fMRIs with children.

Joey Scanga, BS

Programmer

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is imgonline-com-ua-twotoone-gUEIH4OqCi3A3b-4-1024x630.jpgJoey Scanga is from Eureka, Missouri, and has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO). He assists with fMRI data processing and analysis tasks in support of various studies in the SEAL lab, in addition to developing and maintaining software used in conducting experiments related to fMRI, EEG, and eye tracking.

 

 

Graduate Students

Alyssa Labonte, BS

Graduate Student

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-4.pngAlyssa is a PhD candidate in the Neurosciences program at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2019 with degrees in Biology and Psychology, and a minor in Computational Neuroscience. Alyssa has prior experience using EEG to study the interface between sleep and disorders of consciousness. She is currently using precision functional mapping to study neonatal brain organization and development.

 

 


Lab Alumni

Jennifer Lednicky, MS

Coordinator

Jennifer was a staff lab member from 2017-2023.  She graduated with a Masters in Applied Health Behavior Research from Washington University School of Medicine in 2021 and from University of Missouri-Columbia (Mizzou) with a Bachelors in Psychology with minors in Biological Sciences and Chemistry in 2017. She worked as a coordinator for Dr. Sylvester’s studies conducting clinical interviews, eye tracking tasks, behavioral assessments and fMRIs with infants and adolescents.

Megan Manhart

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Megan worked in the SEAL lab as a Professional Rater I from August 2019 to August 2021. She coordinated Dr. Sylvester’s anxiety studies, and conducted eye-tracking tasks, fMRIs, and behavioral assessments with infants and adolescents. In the fall of 2021, Megan began her work towards a Master’s in Public Health with an emphasis in Mental & Behavioral Health at the Brown School at Washington University in St Louis.

Michael Myers, BA

Neuroimaging Engineer

Michael was the lead programmer for the lab for 5 years from 2018-2023. After completing his BA in English in 2009, Michael developed an interest in computer science and has gained experience in business intelligence and analytics. He assisted with fMRI data processing and analysis in support of Dr. Sylvester’s studies.

Amanda Namchuk

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Amanda worked in the lab from June 2018 to May 2019 assisting with subject testing. She also used survey data from the Attention in Anxiety and Depression study to conduct an independent study project for her PNP Capstone examining the relations among family history of psychopathology, child psychopathology, and child attention. In July 2019 Amanda will begin working as a Research Assistant in the Behavioral Psychopharmacology Lab at Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, MD under Dr. Irwin Lucki. She will be assisting with a variety of projects, but she is most excited to help develop novel antidepressants in animal models using metabolites of ketamine. In the fall she will be applying to neuroscience PhD programs.

Shana Sanchez

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Shana worked in the SEAL from September 2015 until May 2017. She helped launch the start of the Anxiety study–recruited, scheduled, helped with MRI’s, eye-tracking, and managed the administrative side of things. Shana went on to study Social Work at University of Chicago, and is now a Child Therapist.

Mario Shafiei, MS

Neuroimaging Engineer

 

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is My-project-1-4-1024x683.jpgMario was a programmer in 2023 for the lab. Mario is a tornado formed by a passion to pierce into the hard problems centered around the brain! He likes to peacefully sweep over green lands of data and harvest the nectars to concoct sweet meaningful decisions to treat brain diseases and disorders. In his free time, he low-key turns into a stream of water and enjoys nature galloping in the saddle of here-and-now!

 

Ben Srivastava, MD

Ben Srivastava worked in the SEAL lab as a PGY4 psychiatry resident at Wash U, from 2017-2018, learning the basics of neuroimaging and working on the functional connectivity of the human amygdala in highly sampled subjects from the Dosenbach Lab (https://dosenbachlab.wustl.edu/).  Working in the SEAL lab was Ben’s first experience with neuroimaging, and he absolutely loved it.  Ben went onto a clinical and research fellow in Substance Use Disorders at Columbia University Medical Center/New York State Psychiatric Institute.  He was working under Chad’s long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Gaurav Patel (https://pateldsclab.net/), applying the techniques he learned in the SEAL lab to look at subcortical-cortical resting state functional connectivity as a predictor of relapse in substance use disorders.

Qiongru Yu, M.Ed

Qiongru worked in the SEAL from July 2017 to June 2019 as a research staff. She worked on applying the fMRI data processing pipeline and developing tools for resting state and task fMRI data analysis for various projects in the lab. Qiongru was also involved in fMRI and eye tracking data collection with infants and adolescents. In fall 2019 Qiongru will join the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology as a PhD student working with Dr. Jillian Wiggins to investigate the neural correlates of child psychopathology.