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12/6/2025
My new co-authored paper titled, "Transition to human fatherhood involves increased brain activation to infant stimuli in regions involved with reward and motivation" is accepted for publication in the Journal of Neuroendocrinology! Online-first article coming soon!
11/11/2025
My invited open peer commentary titled, "Social context links energetic and developmental accounts of life history" is officially out in Behavioral and Brain Sciences!
Ellis, Reid, and Kramer (2024) introduced a compelling two-tiered model showing how energetic stress and ambient mortality cues shape human development in distinct ways, and they called for more nuanced analyses of human life-history strategies.
In response, Marlen Gonzalez and I proposed that this framework can inspire neuroscience to examine how our brain integrates social and energetic homeostasis for self-regulation, and how such common resource accounting mechanisms may be a key to explaining alterations in behaviors and cognition fundamental to survival and health (e.g., why does social disconnection or loneliness ever increase sugar consumption and hunger in social mammals?). Click here for the original article by Ellis et al (2024).
11/3/2025
My new first-authored paper, titled "Oxytocin and the pace of life history strategies: From evolutionary trade-offs to translational pathways," has been accepted for publication in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. The online-first article is available from the link above!
In this review, we ask why oxytocin has such wide-ranging effects across physiology and social behavior. It promotes parental care, supports pair bonding, shapes friendships, and tunes attention to socially meaningful cues. There are many good models explaining these individual functions. But we felt there was still a need for a unifying framework. Do these varied roles evolve independently? Or might they instead reflect coordinated processes serving a shared evolutionary function?
Drawing on life history theory, we propose that oxytocin serves as a regulatory mechanism that calibrates how organisms allocate energy across the lifespan. In safe and supportive environments, increased oxytocin signaling promotes a “slow” strategy characterized by higher parental investment, pair-bonding, in-group cohesion for social buffering, and somatic maintenance (e.g., stress regulation, metabolic health, cellular repair, longevity). We synthesize evidence from both animals and humans to show how oxytocin’s metabolic, cognitive, motivational, and social effects can be understood as interlinked components of a coordinated life history strategy.
10/15/2025
My mentee, Charlotte Cannizzo, an honors student from Cornell University, presented her poster titled "Neighborhood Social Cohesion May Buffer Neural Burden of Social Anxiety on Working Memory," at the 2025 annual meeting for the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR)! Her work showed that people with higher social anxiety exhibited heightened parieto-occipital activation during a spatial working memory task, which correlated with post-task fatigue and felt task difficulty. Interestingly, this neural pattern was dampened among those surrounded by supportive neighbors, suggesting that a sense of social connection may buffer the brain against the anxiety-induced cognitive burden! Congratulations, Charlotte, on your major milestone!
10/3/2025
My new first-authored paper, titled "Resilience through regulation: Individual differences in inhibitory control shape neural and psychological responses to ostracism," has been published in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience.
Using multi-echo fMRI with the classic Stroop and Cyberball tasks, we found that the neural signature of poor inhibitory control (e.g., greater Stroop interference) predicted dynamic shifts in prefrontal–striatal activation during Cyberball: heightened PFC/caudate activation to early perceptual cues of exclusion (even when overall interaction was inclusive), followed by dampened recruitment under explicit, sustained ostracism. This time-varying pattern of neural engagement correlated with greater subjective distress measured after Cyberball. Social exclusion can have a significant emotional toll. Our findings support the view that inhibitory control is not just a cognitive skill, but a cross-domain regulatory mechanism that can shape resilience (or vulnerability) to social pain, highlighting a potential target for intervention.
Please click here for the latest version of the paper!
9/11/2025
I visited the Life History Lab at Cornell University for a workshop on the multi-echo fMRI data pipeline and the new MRI-compatible gustometer I built. It was wonderful to catch up!
8/25/2025
I started a new position as a postdoctoral research associate in the Clinical Aging and Relational Emotion Science (CARES) Lab (PI: Dr. Casey K. Brown) at the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University!
8/20/2025
I presented my research on the neural basis of grandmaternal caregiving and its role in healthy aging at the Science Luncheon Series, hosted by the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas. Thank you Dr. Leehyun Yoon and the DSAN Lab for the invitation and lively discussion afterwards!
8/9/2025
Sarah Caldwell, an honors student I co-mentored in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, has presented her work titled, "Approach Motivation as a Moderator of Campus Spatial Use and Belonging Among Underrepresented Students" for the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program (Funded by U.S. Department of Education). Congratulations on your progress, Sarah!
7/4/2025
My new first-authored paper "Asymmetric access to social vs. economic resources during development calibrates socio-cognitive pathways to risk-taking in emerging adults " has been accepted for publication in Cerebral Cortex!
5/21/2025
I had an invited talk, titled, "Caring to Survive: An Ecological and Neurobiological Perspective" at Remaining Whole, Human, and Hopeful Talk Series, hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) and 4-H Youth program.
5/14/2025
I shared my latest research titled "Reduced OXTR DNA methylation predicts grandmaternal caregiving via distinct neural representations of grandchildren in empathy-related brain regions" at Larry J. Young Memorial Conference. Dr. Young, you will be missed...
5/10/2025
My mentees, Charlotte Cannizzo and Benjamin Loong from the Life History Lab (PI: Marlen Gonzalez), presented their work "When Community Calms the Mind: Perceived neighborhood Social Cohesion Moderates the Impact of Social Anxiety on Working Memory Performance" at the Cornell Undergraduate Psychology Conference (CUPC). Big congratulations to both of you, I'm so proud of you!
4/23/2025
I presented my latest work at the Life History Lab, titled, "A hand-held is a burden halved: Social proximity lowers energetically costly cingulo-prefrontal activation under working memory load" at the 17th Annual Meeting for Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (Chicago, IL, USA)!
4/15/2025
My new first-authored paper "Grandmaternal caregiving is associated with a distinct multi-voxel neural representation of grandchildren in the parental motivation circuit" has been accepted for publication in SCAN! It is now publicly available.
4/10/2025
My new co-authored paper "Hormonal changes in first-time human fathers in relation to paternal investment" is out in Hormones and Behavior!
3/29/2025
I presented my work at the Life History Lab, titled, "Resilience through regulation?: Inhibitory control and early-life socio-economic context shape neural responses to ostracism" at the 32nd Annual Meeting for Cognitive Neuroscience Society (Boston, MA, USA)!
3/8/2025
My new co-authored paper "Caregiving is associated with lower brain age in humans" is accepted for publication in SCAN. It is now publicly available.
2/8/2025
I presented my work from the Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience (James K. Rilling) titled, "Grandmaternal caregiving is associated with a distinct multi-voxel neural representation of grandchildren in the parental motivation circuits" at the 6th Meeting for South Eastern Evolution and Human Behavior (Atlanta, GA, USA)!
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