Samuel D. McDougle
Principal Investigator
Sam is an Assistant Professor in Yale's Psychology Department, and is a program faculty member for Yale's Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Cognitive Science Program, and the Wu Tsai Institute. He earned his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University, and did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Sam uses psychophysical, computational, and neurophysiological techniques to investigate human learning and memory, with a particular interest in the interface of cognition and motor behavior. Sam also likes: playing folk music (fiddle, mandolin, & guitar), opaque IPAs, and rainy days.

CV • Scholar • Git • Twitter ⇾ @smickdougle • Bluesky ⇾ actlab.bsky.social
Skill! ⇾ Old-time/Bluegrass fiddle, mandolin, & guitar

Dawei Bai
Postdoc
Dawei received his PhD from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Dawei's work investigates higher-level representations (e.g., intuitive physics, social agency, body schema) embedded in seemingly lower-level systems (e.g. motor system, vision). He also explores (often unexpected!) connections between these systems and broader domains of human life, such as religion. Outside the lab, Dawei enjoys going to Sam's bluegrass gigs :).

Scholar • Twitter ⇾ @dawei__bai • Bluesky ⇾ daweibai.bsky.social

Zekun Sun
Postdoc
Zekun earned her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied the perception of complexity - what makes things look informationally dense or sparse. Zekun is broadly interested in exploring how the human mind represents and reconstructs complex information to achieve various goals. Her recent work focuses on the temporal construction of mental representation of scenes and actions. Out of the lab, Zekun enjoys spicy food, hot pot, anime, board games, Chinese crosstalk (Xiangsheng), and playing with her very playful dog Gray Bean.

CV • Scholar
Skill! ⇾ Dog grooming!

Sanghoon Kang
Graduate Student
Sanghoon is interested in how actions change memories, and how memories change actions. Specifically, he's interested in how actions exploit the adaptive nature of memories, and how organizational principles of memory and context drive this adaptability. He graduated from Seoul National University, majoring in Psychology and minoring in the Brain-Mind-Behavior combined program. Afterwards, he worked with Woo-Young Ahn at SNU, and then Elizabeth Goldfarb at Yale, investigating how changes in emotional memories relate to substance abuse. In his off-time, he likes to run around town and write short stories. He hopes that, someday, his research will help him to finally learn the keyboard.

CV • Scholar • Git

Apoorva Sharma
Graduate Student
Apoorva completed her bachelor's degree in Life Sciences, followed by a master's degree in Cognitive Science from IIT Gandhinagar in India. She is interested in sensorimotor learning, and how cognitive factors like attention and decision-making contribute to generating effective movement. Her previous work includes studying the mechanisms of motor adaptation. When not delving into brain matter, she watches an unhealthy number of movies, unrestricted by language or era. You can often find her tapping her feet to Dire Straits while attempting to pet every dog that crosses her path.

CV • Twitter ⇾ @Apoorva___18
Skill! ⇾ Painting

Jay Gandhi
Graduate Student
Jay is an MD-PhD student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, co-mentored by Sam McDougle and Al Powers. He studies how the brain compresses information to maintain flexibility and efficiency, and how this machinery malfunctions in neuropsychiatric disease. During his undergraduate years at Columbia University and after graduating in 2020, he worked with Daniel Kimmel and Daphna Shohamy on the impact of framing on contextual learning. Outside of the lab, Jay enjoys playing music (sitar and classical guitar), chasing his dog, and finding any excuse to try new restaurants.

CV

Anikka Jordan
Graduate Student
Ani is a PhD student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program. She earned her BS in Psychology and English from Emory University in 2023, where she studied social communication in neurodivergent and neurotypical preschoolers and wrote an honors thesis on Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. After undergrad, she worked at UChicago with Joel Voss and James Kragel, studying hippocampal long-axis organization with fMRI and eye-tracking. She is broadly interested in the biological processes underlying human memory development and specifically how our fine motor skills improve with practice. She also likes going to small concerts, writing mediocre poems, and is trying to learn to skateboard.

CV • Scholar • Git• Bluesky
Skill! ⇾ Visual Art

Griffin Light
Graduate Student
Griffin earned his Bachelor's of Science in Psychology from the University of Utah, where he studied the neurophysiological correlates and behavioral impacts of filler words during verbal memory retrieval. As a PhD student in Cognitive Psychology at Yale, he is interested in how periods of rest - from brief breaks between trials to longer periods of downtime and sleep - facilitate and optimize learning.

CV

Taylor McClure
Post-grad RA
Taylor McClure graduated from Yale in 2025, majoring in Cognitive Science. As a research assistant in the ACT Lab, she hopes to draw from her background in ballet to explore applications of motor learning to dance and physical therapy. Outside the lab, Taylor enjoys practicing yoga and pilates, and she danced and choreographed for Yale Dancers and the Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company.

Skill! ⇾ Ballet

Catalina Ossmann
Undergraduate RA
Catalina Ossmann is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College studying Cognitive Science on the pre-med track. As a research assistant in the ACT Lab, she is interested in how motor memory and learning contribute to movement and recovery. She hopes to apply this research in the future as a physician, particularly in orthopedic care, to improve physical therapy protocols and post-surgical rehabilitation. Outside the lab, Catalina sings with the Yale Glee Club, volunteers at the HAVEN Free Clinic, and enjoys hiking and spending time outdoors.

Lab Alumni
Tolu Adanri ⇾ Postbac researcher at St. Jude
Naser Al-Fawakhiri ⇾ MD/PhD student at Johns Hopkins
Addison Beer ⇾ Research Assistant at Yale's Wu Tsai Institute
Cameron Berg ⇾ AI researcher at Meta
Tabea Botthof ⇾ Professional hockey player based in Stockholm
Alexander Forrence ⇾ Staff Scientist at Yale's Wu Tsai Institute
Christopher Hewitson ⇾ Research Scholar at Macquarie University
Hanna Hillman ⇾ Postdoc at U Delaware
Maya Ingram ⇾ Psychology PhD student at U Chicago
Michael Irias ⇾ Psychology PhD student at Florida State
Sarosh Kayani ⇾ Postbac researcher at Yale
Olivia Kim ⇾ Assistant Professor at Bates College
Sophia Ou ⇾ Psychology PhD student UC Riverside
Ophelia Pilkinton ⇾ Medical student at U of Tennessee
Sabrina Santos ⇾ Undergraduate Researcher at University of Puerto Rico
Juliana Trach ⇾ Postdoc at Johns Hopkins
Liang Zhou ⇾ Neuroscience PhD student at UCL

The ACT lab is committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion, and in maintaining a fun, challenging, and supportive research environment for everyone.

© Samuel McDougle, 2020