Core Lab Team
CORE Lab Team

Dr. John D. Coley
Lab Director | Principal Investigator
Dr. Coley is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at Northeastern University, and Director of the CORE Lab. He is interested in the basic cognitive processes underlying how people organize and use their knowledge of the world, how those processes develop and change over time, and how differences in culture and experience lead to differences in the organization and use of knowledge. He is also committed to cross-disciplinary translational research, and to exploring the concrete consequences of conceptual organization and reasoning in areas like science education, social conflict, and ecological awareness. Dr. Coley sees his lab as an environment in which smart, motivated, people have the opportunity to work together while learning about research, exploring these issues in lots of different ways, making genuine contributions to cognitive science, and having fun along the way.

Catie Nielson
Doctoral Candidate, 6th year
Catie is a sixth-year doctoral student focusing on human-centered thinking and science learning. In particular, she is interested in how our intuitive ideas about humans color the way that we learn about and care for the more-than-human world. She is also fascinated by how our human-centric biases impact how we think about neuroscience and the relationship between mind and brain across species. Catie has a passion for teaching, mentoring over 70 undergraduate research assistants over the past 4+ years and teaching research methods courses for two summers. She joined the CORE lab in 2020, after completing her Master’s at Northeastern studying emotion and physiology, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Brigham Young University.
Favorite Secondary Character: Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter)

Emma Pitt
Doctoral Candidate, 4th year
Emma is a fourth-year doctoral student in the CORE lab. Her research interests broadly include the ways that people conceptualize and interact with social groups, and the factors that shape social reasoning. She is also interested in how humans relate to the world around them, including how humans relate to nature and non-human animals. When Emma is not in the lab, she is either skiing or wishing she was skiing.
Favorite Secondary Character: Elizabeth Swann (Pirates of the Caribbean franchise)

Joan Kim
Doctoral Candidate, 3rd year
After graduating from Tufts University, Joan spent some time at a cardiovascular imaging lab before transitioning back to psychology with the CORE Lab. She is currently interested in how people think about the natural world/systems and climate change. Her hope is that she can develop interventions in fighting climate change by encouraging people to think about themselves as part of the natural world and rethinking the psychological distance between the self and climate change disasters. In her free time, she likes to bake and dance.
Favorite Secondary Character: Troy (Community)

Krissy Kilgallen
Doctoral Candidate, 1st year
Krissy is a first year doctoral student in the CORE lab. She is interested in a cross-cultural, situative perspective on cognition, meaning that rather than privileging western perspectives as human universals, her research seeks to explore the diversity of human sense making in its relational, interdependent, sociocultural context. Her interest is in applying this perspective to intuitive theories of agent-environment and mind-body relations, and how humans conceptualize and model themselves in the broader web of the natural world. In her free time, she likes to take long, meandering walks and have equally long and meandering conversations.
Favorite Childhood Book: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Kyleigh Watson
Lab Manager
After graduating from Northeastern in May 2022 with a Bachelor of Science in Health Science, Kyleigh made the decision to return back to the CORE Lab as Lab Manager in January 2023. Kyleigh has been both a Research Assistant and Co-op Research Coordinator in the CORE Lab throughout her time at Northeastern. Kyleigh is interested in how science/health information is communicated and what types of communication help or hurt people’s understanding of that information.
Favorite Childhood Book: The Mysterious Benedict Society

Alegra Germain
Research Assistant
Research Interests: Human-wildlife conflict, influences of climate change on wildlife behavior and biological adaptations, wildlife conservation
Favorite Childhood Book: The Percy Jackson series

Amanda Ashmore
Research Assistant
Favorite Childhood Book: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea By Jules Verne

Ella Hanley
Research Assistant
Research Interests: Behavioral neuroscience, neurological diseases and disorders, learning and cognition, disparities in public health
Favorite Childhood Book: Magic Tree House: Blizzard of the Blue Moon

Eva Pintucci
Research Assistant
Research Interests: Social Essentialism, Biomedical Anthropology, Social Determinants of Health, and Behavioral Immunology

Jessica Holstein
Research Assistant
Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Ecological Cognition

Keziah Chinebuah
Research Assistant
Research Interests: developmental psychology, clinical child and adolescent psychology, and cognitive biases
Favorite Childhood Book: The Witches by Roald Dahl

Nicole Shiu
Research Assistant

Nithya Sastry
Research Assistant
Research Interests: Biology
Favorite Childhood Book: Anything by Rick Riordan

Peixin (Kate) Zhou
Research Assistant
Favorite Childhood Book: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

Reshika Sai Devarajan
Research Assistant
Research Interests: Mental health, cognitive development, cultural impact on cognitive processes, and rural health disparities
Favorite Childhood Book: Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock

Daria Healey
MES Master's Student
Favorite Childhood Book: Percy Jackson and the Olympians series

Gwendolyn McManus
Research Assistant, MES Master's Student
Favorite Childhood Book: The Golden Compass

Stephanie (Juno) Mollor
MES Master's Student
Research Interests: environmental justice & education, sustainable aquaculture, sustainable human-computer interactions
Favorite Childhood Book: The Big Friendly Giant

Varaali Chawla
Master's Student, Energy Systems
Research Interests: Sustainability, Environmental Justice, Green Technologies and strategies, Exploring the intersection between Human Behavior and Sustainability, Technology.
Favorite Childhood Book: The Percy Jackson and the Harry Potter Series, The Mahabharata – Amar Chitra Katha Comics