Lab Manager

Zongheng Zhang

»zz2302@bard.edu | 121 Preston Hall

Zongheng is now completing his degree in the Bard College Conservatory of Music. He is double majored in music performance and Psychology, concentrating in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. He is interested in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and the relationship between memory reactivation and the body’s stress response. He wants to work more on coding and programming in psychology studies. Now he’s the assistant for the International Students Office and publishing editor for Bard College Chinese Channel.

Assistant Lab Manager

Jess Rylander

»jr9398@bard.edu| 121 Preston Hall

Jess plans to graduate Bard with a degree in Psychology in the spring of 2022,serving as the lab’s Assistant Manager. She is interested in exploring humanbehavior, memory and cognition, whether it is through studies in the lab or by wayof everyday observations of people in the real world. Her senior project will aim toinvestigate the relationship between emotion and memory. Outside of the lab, Jessserves as a BRAVE Counselor on-call, as well as a member of the Women’sBasketball team. You will likely find Jess with her air pods in, listening to music anyfree moment she has, while simultaneously fueling her pretty severe coffeeaddiction (always iced, of course!).

Lab Managers Emeriti

Nora Grace-Flood

Nora Grace-Flood graduated Bard with a degree in Psychology in 2021 after serving as the lab’s Operations Manager. She is interested in exploring cognition, whether from the perspective of neuroscience, language, biology, or anthropology. Outside of the lab, Nora was also the director of the Teaching Kitchen, which facilitates professional and student-lead cooking classes around campus, and a writing fellow at the Bard Learning Commons. You could also find her making mediocre coffees at Sawkill on Thursday nights. Unlike the rest of the lab assistants, and to the dismay of her pet cat, she is strictly a dog person.

Mike Greenberg

Mike graduated Bard in 2020. He is interested in education and motivation, in particular the mental health impacts of academics-centered education on children. His senior project investigated into the evolutionary basis of learning and how psychological well-being underpins the human ability to learn. He is working toward developing an alternative, well-being based model of public education.

Zall Hirschstein

Zall graduated from Bard to become laboratory manager for Sr. Patricia Grasso and research technical for Dr. Damian Shin at Albany Medical College. He is now moving to Columbia University, where he will be lab manager in Mariam Aly’s lab. While Zall’s senior thesis at Bard focused on building a machine-learning based neurofeedback paradigm to improve learning, his interests are eclectic: How are features of cognition bound together in the brain? How does stress bias the nervous system? What are the limits of augmenting cognition? What distinguishes the human memory system from non-human animals’? How will new computational techniques and big neuroscience reveal the inner working of the brain? When outside the lab, Zall is often found traveling the world in search of profoundly uncomfortable experiences, playing ultimate frisbee, building his furniture, designing graphics, and critiquing movies for not being realistic enough.

Noah Libby

Noah graduated with a Psychology degree in 2019. His senior thesis fell within the realm of computational cognitive neuroscience, aiming to isolate oscillatory signatures of memory competition at the time of encoding and refine a machine-learning classifier that will use this information to make better informed predictions concerning the long-term fate of learned material. Outside of the lab, Noah could be found captaining Bard’s Ultimate Frisbee team, repurposing unwanted technology, writing music, learning how to capture moments through photography, and drinking a gallon of water every day. He is now an Associate Data Engineer at Collective Measures.

Chandler O’Reardon

Chandler O’Reardon graduated Bard in 2021 with a degree in Psychology after serving as the lab’s Personnel Manager. She is interested in the cognitive/neuroscience and developmental branches of psychology, in particular how bilingualism impacts cognition. Her senior thesis investigated how learning a second language through a bilingual education affects the executive functioning skills of children with autism. Outside of the lab, she also worked as a box office ticketing agent at the Fisher Center for Performing Arts and is a gymnastics coach back in her hometown.