Hi, I'm Kathleen! I'm a third-year PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, advised by Dr. Jordan Farrell. I use systems and computational neuroscience approaches to study the neural mechanisms of learning and memory, with a particular focus on how sleep shapes these processes. My research investigates hippocampal circuits and neuromodulatory dynamics that support transitions between internally driven and externally engaged brain states. I recently presented a poster at the 2025 Society for Neuroscience conference on a tool from our lab for analyzing dentate spikes, a hippocampal population event important for memory formation and consolidation that often occurs at such state transitions.

Prior to starting my PhD, I graduated from MIT in June 2023 with a degree in Computation and Cognition and a concentration in Public Policy. See more about my past work below.

Past work

1. Sleep, dreams, and creativity: My undergraduate research at MIT, in collaboration with Dr. Adam Horowitz and advised by Prof. Bob Stickgold and Prof. Pattie Maes, sought to understand how sleep and dreams affect waking cognition. We developed protocols for guiding dreams during sleep onset (NREM1) to study their impact on post-sleep creativity and found that dreaming about a topic can boost creative ideation. To learn more about this work, please see my co-first-author paper on hypnagogic dreams and creativity published in Scientific Reports, as well as feature articles about this work in Science, Scientific American, NIH Research Matters, and MIT News. I also presented a talk on this work at the 2024 Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference and will be presenting a poster on it at the Dream X Engineering Symposium at MIT in January 2026.
2. Visual perception: How do we perceive the world around us? My research on visual perception has focused on understanding the functional organization of the brain's visual system using large-scale neural recordings. As a 2017 Simons Summer Research Fellow in the lab of Prof. Il Memming Park at Stony Brook University, I characterized the neural activity of six regions of the visual system (for more, see my 2018 first-author paper in eNeuro and a video about the project). My work as a research intern at the Allen Institute with Dr. Stefan Mihalas centered on understanding representational drift in the visual system. I presented a poster on this work at COSYNE in March 2023 (more coming soon!).
3. Science, technology, and society: During my undergraduate years at MIT, I became super intrigued by the intersection of science and technology with society and policy, especially given the rapidly changing landscape of AI. Some of my past projects in this realm include conducting technical research for the AI Pedagogy Project and the Invisible Waves project as a summer researcher at metaLAB (at) Harvard, co-authoring the "CLeAR" documentation framework for AI transparency as an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, contributing to the World Economic Forum's "AI for Children Toolkit" as a member of their 2021 AI Youth Council, writing a storytelling series on milestones in tech history as a communications intern at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and serving as the 2022 Executive Director of the MIT Science and Technology Policy Bootcamp.

Beyond the lab

Outside the lab, I love to hike, run, ice skate, make art, and listen to a good audiobook. I'm also passionate about teaching, mentorship, and community building. This year, I am serving as a teaching fellow for Harvard's Mathematical Tools for Neuroscientists course, serving on the executive board of the Harvard United Scholars in Neuroscience, and co-organizing the PiN Nocturnal Journal Club.

Please reach out if you are interested in connecting!