Representing and remembering our structured world

Zach Reagh received his BS in Psychology and BA in Philosophy from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He earned his PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior from the University of California, Irvine, where he trained with Mike Yassa. His dissertation work focused on the functional organization of the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe cortex as individuals discriminate between interfering memories about objects and spatial organization, and how these brain regions were impacted by aging. He then completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California, Davis, working with Charan Ranganath. His postdoctoral work focused on how memory representations in cortico-hippocampal networks are extracted from naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies), and how aging affects neural responses at the boundaries separating events. Zach's current interests include the way structured knowledge is built from dynamic experiences, and how different aspects of event representations may be uniquely vulnerable in the aging brain.