People
Lab Director
Elisabeth A. Karuza
Dr. Karuza completed her B.A. in Linguistics from Georgetown University before earning her doctorate in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. She then pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was supported by faculty in the Departments of Psychology and Bioengineering. She is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Penn State.
PostDoc Scholars
JD Patterson
JD Patterson earned his B.S. in Psychology from Colorado State University and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Binghamton University. He is interested in understanding how humans acquire, represent, and generalize concepts—via behavioral, computational, and fMRI methodologies.
Visit JD’s Website to learn more about his research interests and to view his CV.
Lab Manager
Gwen Wiegand
Gwen Wiegand (she/her/hers) earned her B.S. in Computer Science from Penn State in 2020. She is interested in how hierarchical structures in networks relate to language performance and learning. Gwen hopes to eventually go to graduate school for a doctoral degree in cognitive psychology.
Graduate Students
Catherine Pham
Catherine is a third-year graduate student in Cognitive Psychology pursuing a dual-title in Language Science. She completed her B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Kansas. She is broadly interested in language production, particularly how speakers alter the complexity of their speech when speaking under adverse conditions (e.g., in the presence of background noise).
Visit Catherine’s website to learn more about her research interests and to view her CV.
Clin Lai
Clin (she/her/hers) is a first-year PhD student in the Cognitive Psychology program. She is from Singapore and graduated from Yale-NUS College with a major in Psychology. Her research interest lies in how prior knowledge impacts learning and how individual differences come into play. In between reading journal articles, she also enjoys reading books, ice skating, yoga, and crochet.
Allison Link
Allison (she/her/hers) is a third-year graduate student in Cognitive Psychology pursuing a dual-title in Language Science. She completed her B.A. with a double major in Psychology and Spanish Language & Literature at Stony Brook University in 2019. Her research interests include how monolingual and bilingual speakers extract grammatical structure from language input and whether the processes involved in statistical learning vary between individuals of different language backgrounds.
Paul V. DiStefano III
Paul is a first-year graduate student in the Cognitive Psychology program. He graduated with a B.S. in Integrative Neuroscience from Binghamton University in 2022. He is interested in human categorization, transfer learning, and individual differences.