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Meet the Team - Ataol Burak Ozsu
Ataol completed his BA in Psychology at Bilkent University, where he investigated the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms underlying visual attention. Following his growing interest in mental imagery and consciousness, he joined the Imagine Reality Lab in 2025 as a research assistant on the structured adversarial collaboration project ETHOS. He will study higher-order representations of imagined, perceived, and unconscious stimuli using MEG.
Meet the Team - Michaela Klímová
Michaela is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern, interested in how the visual system transforms the basic building blocks of vision into complex representations. She completed her PhD at Boston University with Sam Ling, where she used fMRI to study how spatial context shapes processing in early visual cortex. Prior to joining The Subjectivity Lab, she worked with MiYoung Kwon at Northeastern, investigating how dim viewing conditions affect visual performance and spatial integration in the visual cortex. Michaela holds a BSc and MSc in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh, where she first developed an interest in consciousness research. Before focusing on visual neuroscience in her PhD, she worked as a predoctoral research assistant at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. Outside of research, Michaela enjoys running, yoga, cooking, and reading.
Meet the Team - Angela Shen
Angela joined ETHOS in January 2024 as a graduate student researcher. She's currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Before this, she completed her BA in Psychology and International Development Studies at McGill University and her MA in Psychology at New York University. She's broadly interested in investigating the behavioral and neural relationships among visual perception, metacognition, and visual attention.
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Meet the Team - Karen Tian
Karen is a Ph.D. student at Boston University, after receiving her B.Sc. at Yale. She studies visual perception, with a special interest in its interplay with visual attention and their dynamics. To probe how the brain makes sense of visual input and gives rise to visual experience, she uses psychophysical, neuroimaging, and computational modeling approaches. She has been working on Experiment 1 of ETHOS since it began.
See her website here.
Meet the Team - Ali Ekhlasi
Ali joined ETHOS in January 2025 as a Postdoctoral Researcher. He completed his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience, where he introduced a novel metric for brain network analysis and the measurement of effective connectivity between brain regions. He has worked on a wide range of brain research projects, applying machine learning techniques to analyze brain data across imaging modalities. Following his Ph.D., he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Sleep and Cognition Lab at the University of California, Irvine. He then joined the Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab at UCI and became part of the ETHOS project. Currently, his research focuses on applying machine learning to evaluate theories of consciousness using fMRI data.
Meet the Team - Peter Lush
Peter holds a BSc in Neuroscience, an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience, and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Sussex, where he is testing imaginative suggestion for changes in visual experience with Zoltan Dienes for ETHOS Experiment 3.
Meet the Team - Xueyi Huang
Xueyi is a PhD student at Northeastern University working with Dr. Jorge Morales. She earned her B.S. in Psychology from Zhejiang University in China before starting her graduate studies. Her research focuses on visual mental imagery, perception, and the shared mechanisms between them. She is currently working on ETHOS Experiment 2 and investigating the visual properties of mental images.
Meet the Team - Kiarra Garcia
Kiarra joined ETHOS in July 2024 as a research assistant. She is currently pursuing her B.S. in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently working on behavioral and fMRI studies that decode vividness in imagery and perception.
Meet the Team - Dr. Benjy Barnett
Benjy completed his PhD in the 2024 under the supervision of Steve. Throughout his PhD, he explored a number of questions related to higher-order theories of consciousness - pursuing them across different neuroimaging modalities. He is continuing his work in the MetaLab to extend the findings from his PhD, while also working as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the ETHOS project. On the ETHOS project, he is working with Nadine to help test the richness of higher-order representations using MEG.
November 2024 - We had our first meeting with the Advisory Board who provided valuable feedback on Experiment 2.
October 2024 - We have created our Authorship and Preregistration policy document. Please read it here.
August 2024 - All teams signed the collaboration agreement, and are able to start working on ETHOS.