Courtney Louis
Courtney (she/her) is a seventh-year graduate student in the MSU Clinical Science program currently on internship. She graduated with a BA in Psychology from Hunter College in 2016, and previously worked as a RA and lab coordinator in Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary’s Emotion Regulation Lab. She is broadly interested in the association between anxiety and cognitive processes (e.g., cognitive control) in female populations, and the use of neurobiological measures to assist with our understanding of this. Importantly, she is also committed to expanding our understanding of these processes in Black women. She hopes that her work will help better inform treatment approaches, our knowledge of mental health, and policy. In her free time, Courtney enjoys listening to music, spending time with family, and cooking.
Email: louiscou@msu.edu
Chris Webster
Chris (he/him) is a sixth-year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology program. He received his B.A. in Psychology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and his M.A. in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to joining the MSU Clinical Psychology department, Chris has worked as a research assistant in various psychological labs at Rutgers and Columbia. Chris is interested in using physiological tools (EEG) to measure the effectiveness of emotion regulation techniques. He is particularly interested in identifying specific emotion regulation techniques that are most effective in reducing anxiety, depression, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms in individuals who are at risk of experiencing high levels of potentially traumatic events. Outside of research, Chris enjoys traveling, attending sports events, listening to music, and spending time with family.
Email: webst230@msu.edu
Grace Anderson
Grace (she/her) is a second-year graduate student in the MSU Clinical Science program. She graduated with a BA in Psychology from Wake Forest University in 2020. Afterwards, she worked as a postbaccalaureate fellow in the Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch at NIMH under Drs. Carlos Zarate and Jessica Gilbert, studying neural networks associated with cognitive and affective reactivity. She is broadly interested in the ways emotional reactivity and regulation can contribute to the maintenance of negative mood state, especially for individuals experiencing internalizing psychopathology. Additionally, she is excited to leverage EEG oscillatory metrics to evaluate neural pathways involved in emotion regulation. To this end, she hopes her work informs methodology techniques and task design. In her free time, Grace enjoys baking, running, hiking, and spending time with her dog.
Email: ande2458@msu.edu
Kenan Sayers
Kenan (he/him) is a second-year graduate student in the MSU Clinical Science program. He graduated with a BA in Psychology and minors in Exercise and Sport Science and Hispanic Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Prior to coming to MSU, he conducted research as an undergraduate research assistant in the Anxiety and Stress Lab and in the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes in the Matthew Gfeller Center (UNC). His research interests include the effect of exercise on anxiety and depression and mental health in athletes. He is also a co-founder of Black Men in Psych, a developing organization dedicated to supporting the success of Black men in psychology and encouraging more black men to explore careers in psychology. During his free time, Kenan likes to workout, watch and play sports, spend time with friends and family, and listen to music.
Ania Pathak
Ania is an eighth-year dual-degree medical and graduate student in MSU’s DO/PhD program, getting her medical degree through the College of Osteopathic medicine, and her PhD from MSU’s Neuroscience Graduate program. She graduated from MSU with a BS in Physiology in 2012, and a BA in Philosophy in 2013. Her previous research experiences have included work in physiology, neuroscience, neurology, placebo, and philosophy– her favorites of which including self-referential processing in Alzheimer’s disease progression, neuroaesthetics, subjective time perception in children and adults with and without autism, and cross-disciplinary work in where science and art intersect, all fueled by an interest in how the nervous system mediates human experience. Her undergraduate philosophy thesis, “Medicine as a Complex Existential Study in Embodied Human Vulnerability” explored this in the context of medicine as a social practice. She is currently interested in understanding how psycho-social processes, including social and affective neuroscience, can impact human physiology, particularly in health and disease and the practice of medicine.
Her work in the Moser lab is primarily focused on two projects: (1) a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan funded project assessing the effectiveness of a psychological intervention for managing stress related to COVID-19 in Michigan physicians, and (2) her dissertation work evaluating the relationship between cumulative sociodemographic risk and EEG measures of executive function, and the impact of progesterone on this relationship across the menstrual cycle.
Ania has been teaching yoga since 2011, lifts weights, loves art, enjoys good food and cooking, and social dances regularly– be it salsa, latin/ballroom, zouk, kizomba, bachata, fusion, or blues dancing. She is a dog mom, traveler, and photographer; and has a fondness for Ansel her dog, big skies, sunlight, mountains, and the American southwest.
Email: pathakan@msu.edu
