Justin Riddler

Research Assistant

Justin

I graduated from UC Berkeley in Spring 2012 with a double major in Cognitive Science and Computer Science. Professor Sonia Bishop has demonstrated various correlates to anxiety by studying functional BOLD activation. Particularly, activation in the amygdala suggests a physiological fear response, while the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) implicates emotional reappraisal and suppression of the physiological response. High state-anxiety may be understood as a tendency for heightened amygdala activation without a compensatory DLPFC regulation; although there is no correlation to either area individually. My work in Sonia's lab used arterial-spin labeling, perfusion MRI, which measures cerebral blood flow (CBF) as an estimate of a brain region's tendency to activate. In the context of anxiety, CBF reveals trends in trait-anxiety, which compliments current theories of state-anxiety in functional MRI studies.

I am continuing my work in Professor Mark D'Esposito's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab on voluntary control of saccadic eye movements using a TMS/fMRI paradigm with continuous theta-burst to DLPFC and frontal eye fields. Furthermore, I am performing a white matter quantification on structural MRI from a large pool of elderly subjects in Professor Bill Jagust's lab. I will be applying to Ph.D. programs in Cognitive Neuroscience.

I enjoy using MatLab's Statistical Parametric Modeling (SPM8), FMRIB Software Library (FSL) and NeuroImaging Python (NIPY) for statistical analysis.

E-mail: riddler-at-berkeley.edu


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