About The Author:
Laura Swain is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of South Carolina Aiken. She earned a B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Carolina Columbia. She later spent 4 years at the University of Michigan studying cortical and cognitive changes in people diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) through MRI neuroimaging techniques before returning to South Carolina.
She currently teaches undergraduate and honors Introductory Psychology, Sensation and Perception, and undergraduate Cognitive Neuroscience, and graduate-level Statistics and Research Methods. Her research interests include cognitive and social-cognitive functioning associated with cortical motor network systems during brain sensitive states, such as during development or when damaged, as well as motor system processing influences in attention, perception, and language. She has published her research in journals that include Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
She recently received a $100,000 grant to develop an electroencephalogram (EEG) laboratory facility at USC Aiken.
Carla Nasca, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral fellow of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in the laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at the Rockefeller University, New York. Dr. Nasca received her B.A. in Molecular Biology and her M.S. in Electrophysiology from the University of Palermo in Italy. She earned her Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Pharmacology from the University Sapienza in Rome, Italy, before moving to The Rockefeller University under the mentorship of Dr. Bruce McEwen.