Cheers to 10 Years of ASPIRE
2025 Symposium
On June 20, 2025, the ASPIRE community came together at UC Davis for a day of ideas, inspiration, and discovery. Our keynote speaker, Dr. Masoud Jasbi, set the tone with a thought-provoking talk on “Language and Logic in Humans and Machines.” The spotlight then shifted to two of our student presenters: Valerie Klein (mentored by Richard Huskey), who explored “Mental Health and Media Selection: In Search of Mechanisms,” and Jake Blumwald (mentored by Erie Boorman and Mark Orloff), who shared insights on “A Cognitive Map Encodes Risky Decisions in Subjective Value Space.” Rounding out the celebration, twenty ASPIRE undergraduate students proudly presented their research posters, showcasing the incredible dedication and creativity they poured into their projects over the past year.
Congratulations to the ASPIRE program on 10 amazing years of connecting students with research labs and sparking countless opportunities for discovery! A huge thank you goes to our incredible director, Steve Luck, for his vision and leadership in guiding ASPIRE through this first decade. As we celebrate the past, we’re also excited to look ahead; Steve is now passing the reins to Brian Wiltgen, who will carry the program forward into its next chapter. Here’s to the future of ASPIRE and the students who will continue to shine!
Jake Blumwald
A Cognitive Map Encodes Risky Decisions in Subjective Value Space
Valerie Klein
Mental Health and Media Selection: In Search of Mechanisms
Poster | Student | Mentor(s) | Title |
1 | Maijunxian (Mark) Wang | Masoud Jasbi | Can Vision–Language Models Think Under Conflict? |
2 | Aneesh Bhardwaj | Charan Ranganath | Methodological Tools for using iEEG in Human Brain Research: MRI-Based Electrode Localization and Machine Learning based detection for pathological brain activity. |
3 | Deborah Cui | Camelia Hostinar, Scarlett Lopez-Aguilar | The Association between Social Media Usage, Loneliness, and Autonomic Physiology among Adolescents |
4 | Nicole Miquilarena | Katie Graf Estes | One Object, Two Labels: Bilingual Word Learning Mechanisms in Infants |
5 | Aditi Kavipurapu | Gene Gurkoff | Therapeutic effects of LSD and Non-Hallucinogenic Analogue JRT in a Rodent Model of Traumatic Brain Injury |
6 | Carine Wong | John Henderson | Meaning Supports Gist Perception |
7 | Karen Ly | Tamara Swaab | Determining the Influence of Bilingual Experience on Phonological Processing |
8 | Milong Zhao | Erie Boorman, Erica Varga | Temporal Dynamics of Uncertainty Cause Anxiety and Avoidance |
9 | Barah Albuhwailah | Audrey Fan, Yufei Zhu | Characterizing Water Exchange Rate Across the Blood-Brain Barrier in White Matter |
10 | John Sun | Lisa Oakes | The Role of Gaze at the Top Half of Faces in Infants’ Face Memory |
11 | Julissa Diaz Garcia | Kathrine Graf Estes | “Here's a cat, un gato!”: Infants’ Vocalization Responses to Parents Code-Switching Labels |
12 | Annalee Gonzalez | Brian Wiltgen, Savannah Maw | Reproducing a pattern separation task across mouse genotypes |
13 | Natalie Bondurant | Mijke Rhemtulla | An s_F Based Test of Network Similarity |
14 | Demiana Eshak | David Corina | Electrophysiological Study of Haptic Stimulation |
15 | Neel Majmudar | Joy Geng, Makayla Souza-Wiggins | Reliance of anchor objects during visual search tasks |
16 | Javen Sevilla | Paul Hastings, Scarlett Lopez-Aguilar | In the Face of Marital Conflict: The Relationship Between Parental Warmth and RSA |
17 | Claire Thomas | Lisa Oakes, Erim Kızıldere, Van Pham | Encouraging Language and Gestures as Motivation for Engagement in Infants |
18 | Ran Ji | Meagan Talbott | What Parents Notice: Linking Caregiver Concerns to Gesture and Vocabulary Outcomes |
19 | Cherish Noritake | Carolynn Patten | Change In Muscle Synergy Components Of Stroke Patients |
20 | Sruti Elangovan | Emily Morgan | Rapid syntactic adaptation in self-paced reading: UC Davis replication |