Meet the lab!
Dr. Lisa Oakes, Principal Investigator
Dr. Oakes received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa from 1991 to 2006. She joined the University of California Davis community in 2006 and is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology.
*** Dr. Oakes is no longer accepting graduate students. ***
Post-Doctoral Scholar
Brianna Hunter
Dr. Brianna Hunter earned her Ph.D in Psychological Sciences from Tulane University in 2022. Prior to her doctoral work, she earned a B.S. in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Florida and a M.S. in Psychological Sciences from Tulane University. Brianna is broadly interested in the reciprocal relationship between attention and learning during infancy. In the Infant Cognition Lab, Brianna uses eye tracking and computational modeling approaches to understand how infants’ unique experiences shape the way they visually explore naturalistic scenes.
Graduate Students
Christian Nelson
Christian graduated Magna Cum Laude with her B.A. in Psychology from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2019. She received several prestigious awards, including 2019 Undergraduate Psychology Student of the Year and was also a distinguished member of the MARC USTAR program, which promotes diversity in research.
Christian was inspired to pursue her Ph.D. in visual cognition while conducting eye-tracking studies with Dr. Paul Zak at the Claremont Graduate University. Additionally, a year-long internship with Dr. Helen Lavretsky at UCLA provided her with a significant research background in cognitive development across the lifespan. These experiences, along with her work in the Design Your Life course with Dr. Heather Butler at CSUDH were vital in shaping her passion for developmental research from a visual cognition perspective.
She joined the Oakes lab in 2019 as a graduate student and studies the ways in which parents scaffold infant cognitive development through joint attention during play. Additional projects include a study into the ways in which infants visually learn about the world around them and learn to interact with their environment.
Shannon Klotz
Shannon earned her B.A. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Scripps College in May 2019 and joined the Infant Cognition Lab in June. While in Southern California, she was a member of Dr. Michael Spezio's Laboratory for Inquiry into Valuation and Emotion (LIVE Lab) and studied Theory of Mind using EEG. There, Shannon explicitly modeled mental representations during both the development and presence of stable cooperation via communication outcomes. This allowed for better understanding of the sophistication, or degree of mental coordination, involved in individuals' social perception and reasoning. In Fall 2021, she started her Ph.D. at UC Davis with the Infant Cognition Lab -- combining her passions for infant cognition and technologies that study mechanisms of the human mind, brain, and behavior.
Erim Kızıldere
I am a PhD candidate in the Psychology Graduate Program at UC Davis with the long-term goals of conducting impactful research on early development and teaching at a major research institution. Throughout my graduate career, I have developed expertise in caregiver-infant interactions. Infants spend their days engaged in activities like feeding, diapering, and playing, most of which involve caregivers. Importantly, these activities provide a context for infants’ learning about the world, with caregivers’ behaviors and language structuring and scaffolding that learning. I explore the moment-to-moment coordination of behaviors between parents and infants, aiming to understand how they respond to and shape each other’s behaviors in real time, how this coordination emerges, its mechanisms, and its role in infant learning.
Van Pham
Van is a PhD candidate in Human Development at UC Davis. Her research focuses on infant and early childhood development, particularly the development of visual short-term memory and visual working memory. During her undergraduate studies, she interned at UC Davis Health, where she gained experience working with both adults and children. She later joined the Infant Cognition Lab at UC Davis as an undergraduate research assistant, where she discovered her passion for developmental research. In 2021, she graduated from UC Davis with a B.A. in Psychology and a B.S. in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. She continued at UC Davis as a master's student in Child Development before pursuing a PhD in Human Development. Through her graduate studies, she has expanded her research to examine the development of visual memory and spatial abilities in infants and young children.
Isabelle Pai
Isabelle is a Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology coming from an Economics research background, with a B.A. in Economics from New York University and consumer research experience at Nielsen and GfK after graduation. She received her Master’s degree in Developmental Psychology, with a Cognitive Development concentration, from Cornell University in 2020. Her primary research interest is in language development, particularly in children's language acquisition. She is interested in how infants and young children acquire language - how they learn new words, how they learn semantic and pragmatic concepts, how they form abstract relations and how this acquisition facilitates their thought formation. In her spare time, she enjoys attending symphonies, cold weather sports such as hockey, figure skating, downhill skiing and spending time in nature.
Davrina Rianda
Davrina is a Ph.D. student in Nutritional Biology, supported by a fully funded scholarship from the Indonesian government. Her research focuses on improving early-life nutrition to enhance child cognitive development and applying advanced modeling techniques in nutrition studies. She earned her MD and Master of Nutrition from the University of Indonesia and is currently an affiliated researcher at the Human Nutrition Research Center-IMERI, University of Indonesia. Davrina has extensive experience conducting community-based studies, including a cohort study and a randomized controlled trial involving mothers and children. Her dissertation explores the impact of early-life nutritional factors, including maternal supplementation and child growth trajectories, on infant attention and memory development.
Junior Specialist / Lab Manager
Zane Mourad
Zane graduated from UMass Boston in 2026 with a B.A in Psychology and a minor in Cognitive Science. During his undergraduate studies, he worked as a research assistant at the Early Minds Lab under Dr. Zsuzsa Kaldy. In his senior year, he completed his Honors Thesis on Proactive Interference in Visual Working Memory in Toddlers. He currently works as a Lab Manager at the Infant Cognition Lab and is particularly interested in visual attention and memory in infants. In his free time, Zane enjoys reading, playing video games, and watching football.