Strengthen work in progress
Offer constructive, specific feedback while projects are still taking shape: from a study question or task design to an analysis, grant, or manuscript.
Emory Decision-Making Megalab
About us
A biweekly forum for colleagues across Emory to exchange ideas about decision-making, computational approaches, and clinical science.
Our mission
EDM Megalab brings together faculty, trainees, and research staff across Emory to understand how people learn, value options, and make decisions—and how these processes relate to mental health.
Our meetings create a regular space for work that benefits from perspectives beyond a single lab. We discuss emerging findings, work through methodological challenges, and connect questions across decision neuroscience, computational psychiatry, affective science, and quantitative psychology.
Colleagues from across Emory, including Psychiatry, are welcome to join discussions, present work in progress, suggest readings, or lead a methods session. You do not need to be affiliated with a core lab to take part or help shape the program.
Our aspiration
Build a lasting, collaborative community across Emory where sharing an unfinished idea is routine, methods travel readily between labs, and trainees help shape the scientific conversation.
We hope that sustained exchange leads to stronger studies, shared tools, and new collaborations that advance our understanding of behavior and mental health.
Our goals
Share practical methods
Make technical knowledge usable through workshops, worked examples, and candid discussion of modeling, measurement, and neuroimaging decisions.
Connect ideas across labs
Read consequential papers together, examine emerging topics, and identify questions that benefit from our complementary approaches and expertise.
Core organizing labs
Six core labs, a wider community.
The Treadway, Brown, Hitchcock, Hallquist, Kragel, and Cohen labs help organize and sustain the Megalab. Their complementary interests provide a starting point for a broader conversation across Emory, shaped by everyone who participates.
TReAD Lab
Michael Treadway
Translational Research in Affective Disorders Lab
Michael Treadway is a cognitive neuroscientist and clinical psychologist who studies motivation and the brain systems involved in weighing costs and benefits.
The TReAD Lab investigates how changes in reward circuitry contribute to motivational difficulties in depression and other affective disorders, including the roles of stress and immune function. Its work combines computational models, brain imaging, assessments of daily experience, and experimental interventions to identify mechanisms that could inform treatment.
COMP Lab
Vanessa Brown
Computational Mechanisms of Psychopathology Lab
Vanessa Brown is a clinical scientist whose research examines learning and decision-making in anxiety, trauma-related conditions, and depression, with an emphasis on processes relevant to treatment.
The COMP Lab uses computational models to study how people learn under uncertainty and how these processes change with psychological difficulties and treatment. Behavioral tasks, neuroimaging, real-world assessments, and interventions help connect formal theories of learning to clinically meaningful questions, including whether computational measures are reliable and useful in practice.
Translational Lab
Pete Hitchcock
The Translational Lab
Pete Hitchcock combines training in clinical psychology and behavioral treatment with computational research on learning and choice in depression and anxiety.
The Translational Lab studies how emotions, beliefs, and context shape decisions, including the processes underlying rumination and worry. Carefully designed behavioral experiments and models of learning and evidence accumulation support its broader aim: translating decision science into precise, scalable psychological interventions, including self-guided treatments.
DEPENd Lab
Michael Hallquist
Developmental Personality Neuroscience Lab
Michael Hallquist studies the brain and behavioral processes underlying personality, emotional instability, and self-regulation, with particular attention to adolescence and young adulthood.
The DEPENd Lab examines how emotions and social cues interact with reward learning and goal-directed decisions. Computational models, functional neuroimaging, and assessments of daily experience help explain individual differences in impulsivity and interpersonal difficulties. The lab also shares training resources in quantitative methods and reproducible data analysis.
ECCO Lab
Philip Kragel
Emotion Cognition and Computation Lab
Philip Kragel studies how the brain gives rise to cognition and emotion, combining psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning to understand what distinguishes different mental processes.
The ECCO Lab develops biologically grounded models of cognition and emotion using functional neuroimaging, physiological recordings, and computational models of behavior. Its work links neural networks and other quantitative models to human brain activity, with an emphasis on predictions that can be tested across independent studies and laboratories.
LUMeN Lab
Ali Cohen
Learning, Understanding, Memory, & Neurodevelopment Lab
Ali Cohen is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who studies how emotion and motivation shape learning and memory from childhood through adulthood.
The LUMeN Lab investigates the brain and cognitive mechanisms through which motivationally salient experiences become lasting memories and guide future behavior across development. Its work combines behavioral paradigms, neuroimaging, psychophysiology, and computational modeling to examine reward, emotion, and the complexity of learning environments across age.
Profiles adapted from the public lab and university pages linked above.
Bring a question to the next meeting.
Suggest a work in progress, a methods session, or a topic for discussion.