Shahin Tavakol

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I completed my undergraduate studies in Life Sciences and carried out experiments in electrophysiology at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. For my Ph.D. studies, I joined the MICA lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where I am currently investigating human relational memory by analyzing behavioral and neuroimaging data in healthy adults and patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. For my CONP project, I designed and openly shared a multifaceted functional MRI task battery for assessing the episodic, semantic, and spatial dimensions of relational cognition.

Research Project

My research project focuses on human relational memory in both healthy and diseased populations. I have developed a memory assessment protocol consisting of various tasks designed to examine different forms of memory, which I administer to participants inside the MRI scanner. Leveraging performance scores on the various tasks in addition to structural and functional brain markers, I implement state of the art analytical techniques to understand the neural organization of relational memory as well as its reorganization due to brain lesions.