BIO

Joey is a 5th year PhD candidate in Neuroscience at the University of California Davis and the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC). His research interests center around understanding the neural basis of self-awareness, including awareness of psychological functions (as in metacognition) and physiological functions (as in interoception). He is interested in understanding how these functions and the neural structures that support them are conserved (or not) across species, with a particular focus on comparisons between non-human primates (primarily macaque monkeys) and humans.

Joey utilizes a variety of techniques to address his research questions. He has expertise in training and testing monkeys on cognitive and affective tasks using a variety of methods including touch screens, eye tracking (with and without autonomic nervous system data collection), and manual testing. He also has extensive experience carrying out neuroanatomical experiments in monkeys, using neuroimaging (structural and functional MRI) and histological techniques.

Joey has deep interests in the function of the “interoceptive-allostatic network”—which includes insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala as its primary hubs. He is pursuing projects related to the evolutionary conservation of this network’s structure and function across species as well as plasticity in this network following intentional damage (i.e., neurotoxic lesions), over the course of healthy aging, and in accelerated aging (i.e., via induction of early Alzheimer’s disease-like pathology). He is carrying out his doctoral work under the advisement of Dr. Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Professor of Psychology and he is supported by a Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31AG077797) from the National Institute on Aging.

A native New Yorker, in May 2019, Joey graduated summa cum laude from New York University’s (NYU) Gallatin School of Individualized Study. At Gallatin he crafted an interdisciplinary concentration titled Brain Science: Mind, Music, and History. His concentration drew from the myriad fields that he is interested in, including neuroscience, psychiatry, ethics, music, history of science, and philosophy of science. He carried out the research for this senior thesis, The role of observational learning in acquisition of an auditory task, in Dr. Dan Sanes’ laboratory at the NYU Center for Neural Science, where he also worked closely with Dr. Todd M. Mowery. He was awarded Departmental Honors for his thesis at graduation.