Dr. Ghuman received his undergraduate education in math and physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and completed his doctoral education in biophysics at Harvard University. He completed his postdoctoral training at the National Institute of Mental Health prior to joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in September of 2011.

Shawn Walls earned his Master's degree in Psychological Sciences from the University of Maine, where his research investigated sex-specific mechanisms underlying ethanol withdrawal. Following graduate school, he joined Dr. Ghuman's laboratory as its founding lab manager, serving a critical role in establishing the infrastructure and operational framework for what would become the Laboratory of Cognitive Neurodynamics (LCND). In late 2013, he transitioned to clinical magnetoencephalography (MEG), where he would make significant contributions to the professionalization of the field. In 2017, Shawn was instrumental in developing and implementing the first national certification program for MEG technologists in the United States, subsequently becoming the nation's first certified MEG Technologist (CMEG). He later transitioned to the commercial MEG sector, culminating in his role as Product Manager for the world's leading manufacturer of MEG technology, where he shaped product development at the intersection of clinical neuroscience and engineering. Shawn has recently returned to the LCND, where he now provides strategic leadership and operational guidance to the laboratory.

Arish is interested in uncovering information processing principles underlying face perception in the brain. Specifically, he seeks to understand the neural code for faces in terms of what (features of a face), where (areas of the brain), when (e.g. how long after we see a face does a particular region of the brain get involved?) and how (e.g. is the neural code for faces modulated by real world social situations?). He develops and uses machine learning techniques to analyze intracranial EEG recordings of human brain activity during visual neuroscience experiments to answer these questions.

Casey is an international postdoctoral scholar with a PhD in visual and cognitive neuroscience from RMIT University, Australia. Her PhD focused on the neural mechanisms of dynamic face perception, including the perception of AI-generated faces (deepfakes). She is interested in the neural mechanisms behind social interaction, face perception, and associated gaze behaviours; and she aims to improve the ecological validity of research methods in social neuroscience.

Mary Kate is a Master's student in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, where she applies computational methods to analyze human intracranial EEG data. She earned her BS in Natural Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist before transitioning into academic neuroscience. During her undergraduate studies, she assisted with research on retinal electrical stimulation safety thresholds in the NDEL lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Her current research investigates the neural representation of affective information in iEEG recordings from epilepsy patients. While prior work has focused on coarse valence categories, she investigates whether fine-grained semantic distinctions such as threat subtypes and affiliative content are neurally distinct, how these representations emerge temporally, and how affective information is organized across distributed networks. Mary Kate aims to begin her PhD in Fall 2027.

Mo is a Bioengineering PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. Mo’s research interests lay in psychology, neuroscience, statistics, and machine learning. She’s broadly interested in studying human visual perception and higher level cognition problems. She has experience working on understanding face perception and its mechanisms with deep learning/reinforcement learning techniques. Mo is also interested in using neuroimaging methods to study the structure and function of human brain. Before coming to The University of Pittsburgh, Mo obtained her master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University and bachelor’s degree in psychology and mathematics from Connecticut College.

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