PI, McNair Scholar

Ben received his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University. In 2009, he was the Outstanding Young Investigator for the Society for Neuroeconomics. Since then, his research has been featured twice in Senator Tom Coburn's Wastebook, a government publication highlighting worthless science.

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E-mail | Website | Calendar | CV

Graduate student

Anilu received her bachelor’s in Neuroscience with a minor in Computational and Applied Math from Rice University. As a true Houston local, she is pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. She is studying the intersection of spatial navigation and memory; and plans to uncover key insights of the two through machine learning algorithms and neuromodulation.

Graduate Student

Assia received her BS and MS in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in robotics from the University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome in Italy. She is now a Neuroscience Graduate student at Baylor College of Medicine.

Post-doctoral fellow

After completing a B.S. in Biology and Science Education at North Carolina State University, Melissa worked as a teacher and research associate. In 2023 she received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UTHealth McGovern Medical School with Dr. Valentin Dragoi, where she discovered cortical representations of social learning. Melissa is interested in social cognition, especially its expression in autism, and continues to investigate neural computations of social behavior in the primate brain. 

Neurosurgeon, Sheth Lab

Vigi Katlowitz is a neurosurgery resident at Baylor College of Medicine who likes science and is bad at blurbs. He has no hobbies.

Post-doctoral fellow, Sheth Lab

Xinyuan received Ph.D. from the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University in 2022. After graduating, she moved to the USA as a MnDrive postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota. In 2025, she joined Baylor College of Medicine as a postdoc.
Xinyuan’s research explores how the brain constructs meaning from ambiguous information. Her Ph.D. work on self-concept and placebo representations revealed how the brain builds stable concepts despite inherent ambiguity. Her post-doc work investigates how uncertainty processing guides decision-making and impacts mental health, as well as how conceptual knowledge flexibly adapts across multilingual contexts. She employs a multi-method approach using fMRI, intracranial EEG, and single neuron analyses to capture these processes across different spatial and temporal scales.

Post-doctoral fellow

Hanlin obtained his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he developed platforms to study brain-muscle communication in individuals affected by stroke. During his M.S. at The University of Texas at Austin and Ph.D. at Rice University, he used ultraflexible electrode arrays to investigate the long-term stability of neural representations. His research interests include neural signal processing, neural interfaces, and identifying the neurological underpinnings of behavior.

Research Technician

James earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Psychology from Rice University in 2025. Like Anilu, he is also a Houston native. He works on understanding the neural mechanisms of language using naturalistic tasks and single-neuron recordings, applying large language models (LLMs), machine learning, and classical NLP algorithms to human neurophysiology. He is particularly interested in how the brain represents grammatical structure.