Katie is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Florida International University, specializing in Cognitive Neuroscience. She graduated from Auburn University (Auburn, AL) with dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Chemistry and Psychology. Katie is interested in how large-scale brain network topology varies both between- and within-individuals over the course of everyday life. She is especially interested in how hormonal fluctuations associated with the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptives contribute to this variability, and how this differs with respect to changes in sleep, exerise, and stress. To assess these factors, she and Taylor Salo designed and launched the Dense Investigation of Variaibility in Affect (DIVA) Study, a longitudinal study using neuroimaging, behavioral, and endocrine measures to track fluctuations in sleep, exercise, stress, and mood over the course of three complete menstrual cycles in individuals using different forms of hormonal contraceptives, in February 2020.
Outside of her graduate work, Katie is the current secretary of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping’s Open Science Special Interest Group and an active member of the open (neuro)science community. She has contributed to a number of open source software packages including Nipype, metaCurious, NiMARE, and phys2bids, as well as in-lab pipeline development for a number of meta-analytic and neuroimaging projects (all code available on GitHub). Katie is currently reworking one such pipeline, IDConn, into a configurable Python workflow for other researchers to use in studying individual variability in functional network topology using fMRI data.
Since 2016, she has been assisting with data collection for the NIH-funded Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a multi-site longitudinal study tracking biological and behavioral development in over 10,000 participants though adolescence. Katie has additionally assisted with study design for NBC Lab projects including DIVA and SEAAS, in addition to setting up physiological recording technology and assisting with multi-echo MRI sequence development/testing at FIU’s Center for Imaging Science.