Iba Baig
Intern student
Iba Baig was an intern in Cai Lab in her fourth-year at Northeastern University studying behavioral neuroscience/data science. She worked on a computer vision and behavioral analysis project, which led to part of the GBAT toolbox. Her interests are in applying neuroscience and technology, such as brain-computer interactions, to aid research and healthcare. She is now a master student of AI at Columbia University
Marco Aqil
Postdoctoral researcher
Marco completed his PhD at the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging in the group of Prof. Serge Dumoulin. He has an MSc in Mathematics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a BSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh. The key questions of his research concern the relationships between cortical dynamics, information-encoding, and subjective experience. He is particularly intrigued by the dialogical interplay between the sensory-visual dimensions of experience and their narrative, cognitive, emotional aspects. Primary results of his research include the framework of graph neural fields (Aqil et al. PLOS Comp Bio 2021) and the divisive normalization model of population receptive fields (Aqil et al. PNAS 2021). He was a postdoc of Cai lab in 2025 and is now a postdoc at UC Berkeley Center of the Science of Psychedelics
Kevin Li
Master student
Kevin graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from NYU. With a strong interest in the biomedical field, he seeks opportunities that would bridge his computer science background with his graduate studies. He completed my master degree of neural engineering at UM. He developed a new User Interface for semi-automatic segmentation of videos for behavioral research at Cai Lab. Some hobbies of his are computers and tennis.
Aakash Singh
Undergraduate student
Aakash is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Miami. He is pursuing a B.S. in Psychology and Philosophy, with minors in Criminology, Political Science, Microbiology & Immunology. He is interested in understanding the cognitive processes behind spontaneous thoughts, perception, memory. On his free time, Aakash likes to practice violin, play video games, and spend time with his friends.
Sofia Estrada
Undergraduate student
Sofia Estrada iss an undergraduate psychology student with a strong interest in law and human decision-making. Her background in pre-law studies has shaped her focus on understanding the psychological factors behind risk-taking behavior through her research. At Cai Labs, she studied spontaneous thought through the lens of law, exploring how internally generated thoughts influence decision-making and risk-taking, with the goal of understanding factors that may predict criminal behavior. By combining insights from cognitive psychology and legal studies, she aims to uncover how everyday thought patterns contribute to high-stakes choices and human behavior.
Danielle Pairot
Undergraduate student
Danielle Pairot is an undergraduate student at UM studying Neuroscience with a minor in Chemistry. She is very interested in brain plasticity and the cognitive aspects of neurodegenerative disorders. Her focus is about advancing research in this area, understanding how these conditions affect the brain and exploring potential treatments to regain lost function.
Hannah Pierce
Undergraduate student
Daniela Ugalde
Daniela was a master student majoring in Neural Engineering at University of Miami. She investigated the performance of brain decoding based on functional alignment on a story-hearing fMRI dataset.
John Day
Research Assistant
John was a research assistant at the Cai Lab (remotely in Tokyo). He is originally from Detroit, Michigan, United States. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 2020. He is interested in the relationship between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence. His current research involves developing and drawing insight from brain-inspired AI. Besides research, John spends his free time working out, discovering new music, and teaching himself Japanese. After working at Cai Lab, he works as an ML engineer at OrbitalNet in Japan
Aaron T. Nakamura
Research Assistant
Aaron Nakamura contributed to many projects at Cai Lab while we were at UTokyo and performed almost all the fMRI scanning. He was most actively contributing to the project on decoding spontaneous thoughts. He attended the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for his graduate education in counseling psychology after earning his Bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in TESL (Teaching ESL). He has a background in working for youth at a mental health treatment center. His research focuses lie primarily in the fields of clinical, developmental, and cultural psychology. He is interested in examining the impact of Early Childhood Adversity (ECA), mainly child maltreatment, and alterations in brain structures/functions. He is also interested in investigating how people can formulate and stabilize one’s national, racial/ethnic, and cultural identity through ECA. He is also broadly interested in language acquisition. After working at Cai Lab, he is now pursuing his PhD degree at University of Hawai’i
Kayo Matogawa
Matogawa san managed the lab’s logistics. She has experience working in various educational institutes and industry. Without her, everyone else would have be constantly occupied and confused by paperwork in Todai. She is now working at IRCN’s administrative office to support all foreign researchers.
Zixun Wei
Zixun was an intern and research assistant in the lab from 2021 to 2023. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from Waseda University, Japan, majoring in mechanical engineering and minoring in computer science. In the lab he worked with Jianing on improving the algorithm for aligning ego-centric eye-movement data and analyzing open-access fMRI data to understand factors underlying data quality. After leaving the lab, he joined a master program in the Graduate School of Arts and Science, The University of Tokyo, in Fall 2023.
Junxia Wang
Junxia was a research assistant at Cai Lab from 2021 to 2023. She got her bachelor’s degree from Peking University, China, where she majored in physics and minored in economics. In the lab, she worked on computational modeling of multi-echo fMRI data. In her spare time, she likes reading and hanging out with friends, exploring coffee shops, delicious foods, and mountains.
Taiping Zeng
Taiping was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab between 2020 and 2023. He received his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience and robotics from The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China in 2019, after working with Prof. Bailu Si on computational models of mammalian spatial navigation. His research focuses on decision-making in spatial planning, robotics, spatial cognition and navigation. In the lab, he worked on brain’s representation of 3D scene structure. He is also interested in using robots for testing hypotheses and validating models of nervous systems, and further generating valuable insight into cognition. He has now started his lab in ISTBI of Fudan University.
Mujie Cui
Mujie worked as a part-time intern in the lab. She is interested in economic decision making.
Xiangjing Shen
Xiangjing was a research assistant in the lab between 2021 and 2022. Before he became a member of the lab, he worked as a machine learning engineer in the industry, focused specifically on natural language processing. During the time, he also learned about mental health/educational counseling practice. In the lab, he worked on fMRI encoding and decoding models for studying spontaneous thoughts, with the hope of developing diagnostic biomarkers. Besides working, he likes playing basketball, reading novels, writing, and spending time with my friends.
Jianing Mu
Jianing did a remote internship when she was an undergraduate student from Haverford College in the summer of 2021, working on predicting gaze patterns in egocentric infant eye-tracking data. She majored in psychology with minors in neuroscience and statistics. She is interested in the interaction between attention and memory. In her free time, she enjoys working as a theater technician, cooking, and reading fantasy novels. Currently, she is a PhD student at the Department of Neuroscience of UT Austin
Jialing Ding
Jialing was a part-time research assistant in 2021. She received her B.A. degree in Psychology from Waseda University with a minor in Software Study. She also studied Cognitive Science at UC San Diego during her 1-year studying abroad. Her research interests surround the field of learning and decision-making in people with mental diseases, especially anxiety disorders. Besides study, she volunteered at an NPO aiming to support Chinese international students’ mental health and worked as a production assistant at Olympic Broadcasting Services and movie Detective Chinatown 3. In her free time, she enjoys watching movies, playing badminton, and traveling. She later obtained a master degree at KU Leuven and worked Yael Ni’v lab as a visiting student.
Tushar Arora
Tushar Arora was a research assistant at the Cai Lab in 2020-2021. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at IIIT-Delhi, India. His research work aims to understand object representation emergence and 3D scene understanding. Outside of the lab, you can find him hiking with his camera or reading fiction novels. Tushar is a now master student of neuroscience at Stony Brook University.
Brandon Townsend
Brandon Townsend was a part-time intern in February-August 2021. He graduated from the University of California-Santa Barbara, majoring in sociology and minoring in applied psychology. His current interests revolve around the intersection between mental health and mechanisms of implicit bias decision making. He was a master’s student studying public health via an online graduate school program at the University of Nevada-Reno, and also studied Japanese in Tokyo.
Yuma Kajihara
Yuma was a Research Assistant in April-August 2020, working on discovering signatures of psychiatric disorder from fMRI data in natural task. He is now a PhD student with Kenji Doya at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.