Elvisha Dhamala, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and the PI of the Brain-Based Predictive Modeling Laboratory. She earned her BSc in Neuroscience in 2017 from McGill University, and her PhD in Neuroscience from Weill Cornell Medicine in 2021 where she completed her research in the CoCo (Computational Connectomics) Lab. She completed her postdoctoral training as the inaugural Kavli Institute for Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity in the Holmes Lab at Yale University.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Erynn Christensen, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the BPM Lab. Her research investigates the influence of sex hormones on neurocognitive function. She is particularly interested in the relationships between fluctuations in female sex hormones, neurocognition, and mental health across the menstrual cycle and during key life transitions such as puberty, pregnancy, and menopause. Dr. Christensen earned her Bachelor of Psychological Sciences (with Honours) from Monash University, Australia, in 2017 and completed her PhD there in 2024. Her work to date has focused on the neurocognitive correlates and predictors of addictive behaviors, with a particular emphasis on longitudinal models and cognitive task development.
Lisa Wiersch, PhD is a postdoctoral researcher at the BPM Lab. Her research investigates the associations of stressful life events on brain structure in early adolescence using machine learning analyses and whether these associations differ between males and females. Dr. Wiersch earned her MSc in Psychology from the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2019 and completed her PhD in the Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7: Brain and Behavior) in the brain variability group. In her doctoral thesis she studied sex differences in brain structure and function, with a particular emphasis on methodological considerations in sex classification analyses.
Researchers and Coordinators
Noelle Arcaro is a clinical research assistant at Zucker Hillside Hospital. She currently contributes to clinical projects on neuromodulation (TMS and ECT) for psychiatric illness and is involved in research with the BPM Lab. Noelle’s research interests include sex differences in the symptom presentations and neural correlates of affective and developmental disorders. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from Hofstra University in 2021, where she completed an honors thesis on sex differences in the neural basis of reward processing in adults with autism spectrum disorder.
Alumni
Amelia Abell (Undergraduate Student)
Katharina Brosch (Postdoctoral Researcher)
Pia Jauhar (High School Student)
Kylie Lam (High School Student)
Ella Moskowitz (Undergraduate Student)
Allison Pearlman (Undergraduate Student)
Brain-Based Predictive Modeling Lab 