PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Megan M. Herting, PHD

Dr. Herting is a behavioral neuroscientist with expertise in neurodevelopment using mutli-modal MRI techniques, including structural MRI, functional MRI (fMRI), resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fcMRI), and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI).

Dr. Herting is an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine and has a joint appointment in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. She is also a Faculty Mentor for the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program.

Recent Publications can be found here

STAFF

Anisa Azad

Research Coordinator

Anisa graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Molecular and Cell Biology. She then got her Master's in Neuroimaging and Informatics at USC. In addition to running the NEAT study, Anisa is involved in pre-processing and quality control of the structural scans, assisting with the pipeline to pre-process the diffusion weighted images for both ABB and NEAT, and white matter tractography through amygdala subnuclei in NEAT.

Kimberly Felix

Project Assistant

Kimberly graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in Public Health. Her work entails recruitment, outreach, database management, and data collection for the NEAT study. She also pre-processes and analyzes the activity monitor data from both ABB and NEAT to get measures of physical activity for the DORI project.

Dora Cserbik

Project Specialist

Dora received her Bachelor's degree in public health and Master's degree in biomedical sciences from the Netherlands. She specialized in environmental epidemiology. She is involved in projects that are related to air pollution, namely ABCD-AIR, ONES/ABB, and DORI. For the ABCD study, she is currently working on relating air pollution exposures to brain measures.

GRADUATE STUDENTS

Sandhya Chakravartti

Graduate Student

Sandhya graduated from USC with a Master's degree in Neuroimaging and Informatics. She is currently a PhD candidate at USC in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. Her research interests include understanding how physical exercise relates to cognitive abilities and brain outcomes during adolescence, using multimodal neuroimaging techniques and big data.

Claire Campbell

Graduate Student

Claire graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior. She ran the ABB Pilot Study which looked at the effects of air pollution on brain development and obesity in young adults. Her work evolved to include working on an R03 grant examining the associations between amygdala subnuclei and age, sex, BMI, and puberty in adolescents and creating air pollution estimates for critical periods of development for our DORI project.

VOLUNTEERS

Raymond Jackson

Volunteer

Raymond graduated from UC Irvine with a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences. He then got a Master of Public Health degree with a concentration in Biostatistics/Epidemiology at USC. He is working on data entry, data analysis, and geocoding for the ABB and NEAT study.

ALUMNI

Robert Kim

Volunteer

Robert has a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering. He was a Pre-Med Post-Bac Student at USC and would like to apply to medical school. He is working on analyzing the data for the food cues fMRI task for both ABB and NEAT. He also works on amygdala analyses for the NEAT study using the CIT168 atlas.

Miguel Jaime

USC URAP Student

Miguel is a B.S. candidate at USC and is currently studying Biomedical Engineering. He was working on developing an Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) pipeline to pre-process ABB data and analyze air pollution effects on cerebral blood flow.

Xiaofang Chu

Xiaofang graduated from Nanjing Medical University, China, and she got her Master of Science degree at USC. She worked on data entry and data clean-up on Qualtrics and Redcap for the Air, Brain and Behavior Study.

Mengyi Li

Mengyi Li got her Bachelor’s Degree in Global Health from Wuhan University, China. She is now at USC to get her Master’s in Public Health on Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She worked on data entry and analysis for the ABB study.

Dania Ruiz

Dania is a senior at Smith College studying Neuroscience and Spanish. She was a volunteer at the USC Herting Lab during the summer of 2018. She worked on physical activity data analyses for the ABB study.

Samah Alothman

Samah got her Bachelor’s degree in Medical Laboratory Technology from King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia. She is now a MPH student (Epidemiology & Biostatistics) at USC. She helped with our studies examining amygdala development in healthy adolescents by conducting data analyses.

Michelle Canales

Michelle got her Bachelor’s Degree at UC Davis, and received her Master of Art Degree at Columbia University. She was the Research Coordinator for the NEAT study, and currently is in the Occupational Therapy Program at USC.

Adam Mehzer

Adam was a neuroscience PhD student at USC. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree at UC Berkeley. He worked on neuroimaging processing for Herting Lab.

Cory Johnson

Cory is a Medical student at USC Keck School of Medicine and will be completing his residency in family medicine at UCSF. He worked in the Herting Lab when he was working towards his Master of Public Health degree at Keck School of Medicine, and helped with the amygdala development project.