Lab Members

Tracy Butler

Dr. Butler is director of the lab. She is an assistant professor of neurology in Neurology and Psychiatry at NYU. She graduated with honors from Amherst College with undergraduate majors in philosophy and neuroscience. She completed medical school, neurology residency, and clinical fellowship training in epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology at Columbia University. She completed an NIH-sponsored research fellowship in cognitive neuroimaging at the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. In 2010, she moved from Weill Cornell to join the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. Dr. Butler’s research uses Positron Emission Tomography, functional and structural MRI, and complementary techniques to better understand the biological basis of human epilepsy, including its psychiatric aspects, focusing on the interrelated contributions of neuroplasticity and inflammation to seizures and epilepsy.

Thomas Thesen

Dr. Thesen is a faculty member of the lab. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at New York University. Dr. Thesen also co-directs the Cognitive Neurophysiology Research Group. The group has a special emphasis on cognitive and translational research: moving state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques from the laboratory into the clinical practice, and at the same time using the clinical environment to generate novel hypotheses about brain function that can be tested in the laboratory.

Patrick Harvey

Patrick Harvey is a research assistant in the lab. Patrick received a BS in psychology from SUNY-Binghampton and an MS in Neuroscience and Education from Teachers College of Columbia University. He worked at Weill Cornell’s Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology before joining the lab as a research assistant in 2012.

Adam Mosa

Adam graduated from Penn State University in 2010 with a BSc in Biology and a minor in Philosophy. As an undergraduate, Adam co-founded the Penn State student organization, TippyTaps for Africa, which provides low-cost hand washing stations and educational programs to elementary schools in rural Uganda. From 2011-2012, Adam worked with Dr. Butler as a Research Assistant at the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. He is now pursuing a MSc in Physiology at the University of Toronto and studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms of adult neurogenesis.

Hugh Wang

Xiuyuan (Hugh) Wang received his bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai University, China, and master's from City College of New York. He is a research assistant in the lab working on biomedical signal and image processing.

Collaborators at NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center

Dr. Orrin Devinsky
Dr. Ruben Kuzniecky
Dr. Jacqueline French
Dr. Karen Blackmon
Dr. Chad Carlson
Dr. Daniel Friedman
Dr. Delia Talos

Collaborators at NYU Langone Medical Center

Dr. Mony DeLeon
Dr. Yu Shin Ding
Dr. Kent Friedman
Dr. Mariana Lazar
Dr. Helen Scharfman

External Collaborators

Dr. Laszlo Zaborszkie Rutgers University
Dr. Shankar Vallabhajosula Weill Cornell Citigroup Biomedical Imaging Center
Dr. Susan Gauthier Weill Cornell Department of Neurology
Dr. Anat Maoz Weill Cornell Citigroup Biomedical Imaging Center
Brigham and Women’s Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory
UCSD Multimodal Imaging Laboratory