PEOPLE | L-Neuro Lab

Meet the Team

Principal Investigator

Olessia Jouravlev, Associate Professor

Dr. Jouravlev is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University and Principal Investigator at the L-Neuro Lab. Dr. Jouravlev has a PhD in Linguistics from Altay State University (Russia) and a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada). She completed post-doctoral training in Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT (Cambridge, MA, USA).

Graduate Students

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Nadine Charanek, PhD Cognitive Science

Nadine’s research focuses on working memory processes in chimpanzees and humans.

Part of her work at the LNeuro-Lab investigates visuospatial processing in both bilinguals and monolinguals compared to chimpanzees as well as the behavioural and neural bases of such processing using eye-tracking, EEG and fNIRS techniques.

Research Interests: Working Memory, Comparative Psychology, Autism, Dementia, Human Factors Research, Bilingualism.

Arthur Hamilton, PhD Cognitive Science

Arthur is a PhD student researching bilingualism in neurodiverse populations. His current focus is differences in how cognitive symptoms appear in the two languages of bilinguals with schizophrenia or autism. He is also interested in the neural mechanisms of these differences and has experience with EEG and MRI. Before starting his PhD in 2021, Arthur did research on how sense of self is altered in people with schizophrenia and how intellectual disability is understood and certified in a non-Western context. He is co-supervised by Dr. Synthia Guimond at The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.

Irina Smirnova-Godoy, PhD Cognitive Science

Irina has done research on mental lexicon and European court of human rights as part of completing her MA in Linguistics (US) and MA in European and Russian studies (Canada) degrees. She has presented at several international conferences her research on language translation process. During her PhD program at Carleton University, she has studied misinformation paradigm, neural correlates of simultaneous interpreting and grey matter differences in bilingual and monolingual brains.

At present, her main focus is on understanding the phenomenon of language learning aptitude through experimental measurement of individual differences.

Akshaya Baskar, PhD Cognitive Science

Akshaya possesses a bachelor's in biomedical engineering and a master's in biomedical engineering. She is currently pursuing her PhD program in Cognitive Science. She has a few years of experience in clinical behavioral studies, vision research, and cognition. Since she joined our lab, she has been working on the localization of language development in the brain, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (FNIRS). Given her multidisciplinary experience, she is very much interested in language processing, mood disorders, multilingualism, and cognition.

Noah Chuipka, PhD Cognitive Science

Noah holds a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from uOttawa, and a Master of Cognitive Science. His research focuses on using both EEG data and behavioral assessments to investigate the spatiotemporal mechanisms of depression/MDD, namely through the large domains of music and language processing. Besides his primary position at the L-Neuro Lab, he is also affiliated with the Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics lab at the Ottawa Royal’s IMHR.

Research interests: neural dynamics, music cognition, language processing, psychopathology, intrasubject differences

Masih Zaamari, PhD Cognitive Science

Masih holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master's degree in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on human imagination and mental imagery through the development of computational models. At the L-Neuro Lab, he collaborates on investigations into visual mental imagery from a neuroscientific perspective, utilizing advanced brain imaging techniques. With a strong interest in computational modeling and neuroscience, Masih aims to understand the intricate processes behind imagination and mental imagery.

Fatemeh Maleki, MA Cognitive Science

Fatemeh Maleki is a master’s student at the Linguistic Neurodiversity Lab (L-Neuro Lab), researching brain-based language processing with a focus on autism. She uses EEG to study language processing and designs experiments to gain insights into diverse brain functions. With a background in Psychology and Cognitive Science, she has strong data analysis skills and experience supporting individuals with autism. Her interests include autism, addiction, and dream studies, and she has led workshops on lucid dreaming and cognitive biases.

Mary Nehme, MA Cognitive Science

Mary is a second-year Master’s student at Carleton University. In the LoLa and L-Neuro labs, she researches N400 and P600 effects in natural and programming languages, aiming to pursue work on TBI, mental health, and language. She hopes to continue her career in academia, focusing on neuropsychological research into traumatic brain injury (TBI) and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), with particular attention to language processing in athletes.

Aya Amer, MA Cognitive Science

Aya holds a bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science, and is working toward a masters degree at the L-Neuro Lab. She currently serves as the lab's EEG coordinator. Her thesis work examines the cognitive constraints on language structure and language acquisition.

Sarah Blackburn, MA Cognitive Science

Sarah holds a Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science and is in her first year working towards her Master's degree. She is interested in examining women's mental health and how this can be affected by hormonal changes. Her research hopes to focus on the effects of how hormonal status affects emotional processing in women with ADHD. She is also interested in advancing her experience in coding, data analytics and data science.

Fengwei (Isaac) Lui, MA Cognitive Science

His research explores the intersection between language and social reasoning. Having studied the effect of multilingualism on identity negotiation, he is excited to investigate how the human mind respond to various social situations on a cognitive level. He is also passionate about applying these insights to language models, hoping to inspire novel perspectives to building ethical AI systems.

Caressa van Walraven, MA Cognitive Science

Caressa is a Cognitive Science Master’s student from the Netherlands. She is fascinated by how executive functioning interacts across bilingual and neurodivergent contexts, as well as across species. More broadly, she's interested in how diverse cognitive systems adapt, communicate, and reveal the flexibility of the human (and non-human) mind.

Honours Thesis Students

Shanorah Brown-Vilma, Honours student

Shanorah is in her final year of an Honours degree in Cognitive Science, with a concentration in the Biological Foundations of Cognition and a minor in Psychology. She’s particularly interested in how neurodevelopmental differences shape language and cognition, and hopes to apply her research within the field of child neuropsychology. Her thesis examines predictive processing in individuals on the autism spectrum, focusing on how they evaluate cloze probabilities during sentence comprehension. Fun fact: she’s a big rugby fan (Go All Blacks!) and her favourite dessert is Jian Dui.

Anna Cole, Honours student

She is currently in the fourth year of her undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Biological Foundations. Her thesis focuses on exploring differences in phonological processing between monolingual and bilingual individuals. When she’s not focused on her studies, she enjoys spending time outdoors and with her horses.

Research Assistants

Daria Kievsky

Daria is a fourth-year B.Sc. honours psychology student with a concentration in cognition and a minor in neuroscience and mental health.

Her research interests focus on physiological measures of brain activity involved in memory, visual mental imagery, perception, consciousness, and imagination. She is further interested in neuropsychiatry, cognitive neuropsychology, and neuro- and psychopharmacology. In the L-Neuro lab she is helping examine embodied cognition during second language processing through eye-tracking. She is also a part of the CLaSSI Lab where she works on cognition and language topics, including crossmodal associations between colour and sound, as well as sound and phonetic symbolism. Daria plans to pursue a career in clinical psychology while continuing to contribute to research in these areas.

Outside of academia, she enjoys attending rock and metal concerts, playing musical instruments, spending time with animals in nature, and doing anything creative and crafty!

Lab Alumni

Veronica Chiarelli, PhD
Sam Egan, MA
Sandrine Hachez, MA
Emma Hayter, MA
Alex Rivard, MA
Ashley Soklaski, MA
Nayna Kirubakar, MA
Marina Panfilova, MA

Yammam Mohammed, BCS
Hannah James, BCS
Audrey Leclerc, BCS
Madison Mountford, BCS
Vegas Hodgins, BCS
Sarah Mccauley, BCS
Yasmine Benkirane, BCS
Brianna Allard, BCS
Cody Cane, BCS
Tara Dane, BCS
Courtney Hnatyshyn, BCS

Dalia Serik, BCS
Jenn Stranaghan, BCS
Brent Porter, BCS
Stephanie Oxales, BCS
Lilah Krause, BCS
Aahana Uppal, BCS
Amanda Schmidt, BCS
Naomi Brake, BCS
Tyler Call, Postbac
Michelle Elliott, Postbac
Grace Yee, Postbac