Dr. Joao Guassi Moreira – Information for Prospective Graduate Students
Website: https://psych.wisc.edu/staff/guassi-moreira-joao/
Current research: Dr. Guassi Moreira’s Computational Developmental Neuroscience Laboratory (CDNLab) studies the neurodevelopment of affective and social phenomena between late childhood and emerging adulthood. Currently, CDNLab is particularly interested in the development of emotion regulation and decision-making, and the nexus between the two. Some of the research questions we ask questions are ‘how does the brain change to help improve emotion regulation skills with development?’, ‘why are some emotion regulation strategies better or worse at promoting adaptive outcomes?’, ‘why do some individuals make risky decisions more than others when they become teenagers?’, ‘how do our mental models of specific others change with experience, and how does this impact how we spend our time with them?’. Research in the lab will combines traditional psychological methods with emergent neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI) and computational techniques, and will also support original quantitative methods research in service of answering core substantive research questions.
Communication Prior to Applying: I highly suggest prospective students who are planning to apply to my lab contact me via email (jmoreira2@wisc.edu) with their CV and brief description of the research they hope to pursue as a doctoral student. I am also happy to answer questions about my lab’s research via email. If the questions are not easily answered via email, then I may suggest a video call. I don’t privilege or prioritize applications from prospective students who have contacted me prior to applying or who have had a video call with me. Instead, these calls are really for the prospective student to ask questions that impact whether they plan on applying. I’d note that if you have questions about completing/submitting the UW Madison Psychology Department application itself, the best person to contact is our graduate coordinator, kbelt@psych.wisc.edu
Areas I’m Willing to Advise Students in: Developmental, Social, Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
How I Evaluate Applicants: Like all faculty members in the Psychology Department, I evaluate prospective graduate students in a holistic manner. I therefore consider all the possible ways in which students’ applications materials can demonstrate excellence and a strong likelihood to thrive in the graduate program and in my lab. As such, the information below should be treated as general rules of thumb rather than a highly proscriptive “checklist” of attributes that candidates must have in order to be considered for admittance to my lab.
- Academic & Research Preparation: Successful applicants to my lab will likely have an academic and research record of excellence and intellectual curiosity. I do not use strict cutoffs based on academic and research history but I do holistically evaluate the extent to which prospective students have shown previous academic excellence in the classroom and the lab (GPA, letters of recommendation, prior research experience, etc.). My lab uses tools/takes inspiration from a host of disciplines across, and outside of, psychology (e.g., computer science, statistics, biology, anthropology, sociology, economics), so I look for applicants who have coursework and research experience from other disciplines while acknowledging that students are not going to be experts in any one area. Finally, applicants will be best served if they have some kind of meaningful experience with programming and/or statistics. Students who do not have such experience are not necessarily at a disadvantage if they can demonstrate intellectual fearlessness, curiosity, and a strong work ethic to learn such skills in graduate school
- Research preparation: Previous research experience is strongly encouraged (e.g., as an undergraduate research assistant or post-bac staff member of a psychology or neuroscience lab). Applicants with more extensive experience (e.g., independent research project) will be prioritized.
Personal statement: Your personal statement should touch upon two keys points.
(i) First, what kind of research program do you hope to pursue in graduate school? The purpose of a PhD program in experimental psychology is to train scientists on how to grow and develop an independent program of research as a lead investigator – i.e., become an expert in a topic by conducting research at the cutting edge of said topic. This is true regardless of whether the trainee wishes to pursue a career at a research institution, a teaching institution, industry, government, etc. The act of growing and refining this program of research endows one with expertise in various skills to succeed in any of these career paths (albeit by relying on different subsets of skills depending on the path). An applicant doesn’t need to have a precise and accurate roadmap of how they want to build a research program during graduate school, but they need to be curious enough to have ‘rough draft’ of said road map in place. This will allow me to assess fit with the lab, my mentorship style, and one’s intellectual curiosity and ambition.
(ii) Second, why do you want to pursue this work in my lab. How do the things that motivate you, questions that interest you, etc. align with my lab? Fit between a mentor and a mentee is so important for both mentee success and the health of the mentor’s lab. I want to take students that I am able to help put into a position to succeed. Outlining why you think my lab is an ideal place to kickstart your research program is going to help me evaluate fit and make sure that everyone comes away with a good deal.
Beyond these two points, I make every effort to create a tight-knit and supportive lab environment where every lab member feels that they belong, and that their abilities and efforts are respected and nurtured by every other lab member. As such, insights into your potential to contribute to such a community and to collaborate effectively would be valued in the personal statement.
- Other: I am looking to break into new areas and methods of research that may not be currently obvious from the lab’s publication record. This includes: (i) event segmentation in the context of emotion and emotion regulation, (ii) using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the mechanisms of human emotion regulation, (iii) naturalistic fMRI, (iv) developing and refining quantitative methods for psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists based around regularized regression, (v) ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and (vi) deep phenotyping, especially with fMRI data. If your research interests intersect with of the areas or methods above and the lab’s current research directions, please consider applying.