Camille Phaneuf

Activities as a student:

During my undergraduate studies, I held leadership positions in the Neuroscience Student Association and Phi Sigma Pi National Honors Fraternity. I also served as a Writing Fellow in the Sweetland Center's MWrite Program and as an Honors Mentor in the LSA Honors Program. Most of my time outside of class, however, was devoted to research: I worked with Dr. Daniel Kruger from freshman to senior year, Dr. Jillian Hardee from junior to senior year, and in the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety during senior year. Under Dr. Kruger's mentorship, I wrote my Cognitive Science Honors Thesis, titled “Cell Phone Dependence and Socialization: Digital Devices and their Impact on Undergraduate Communication and Behavior.” While under Dr. Hardee's mentorship, I wrote my Neuroscience Honors Thesis, titled “Food Addiction in Adolescents as Assessed by Inhibitory Control and the YFAS-C.” Outside of Michigan, I participated in a Neuroscience Study Abroad Program at the University of Salamanca. Additionally, I spent two summers interning for the Language Learning Lab (led by Dr. Joshua Hartshorne) at Boston College.

Since graduating from U-M:
After graduation, I moved to New York University to begin my Lab Manager position in the Hartley Lab (led by Dr. Catherine Hartley). There, I studied the human neurodevelopment of value-based learning, memory, and decision-making using behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational modeling methods. In tandem, I was responsible for a slew of lab administrative responsibilities, including IRB adherence, participant payment, subject recruitment, and new member onboarding. I am currently transitioning from the Hartley Lab to the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab at Harvard University, where I will be pursuing my PhD with Dr. Leah Somerville.

Career and other highlights that you're most passionate about or proud of:
I learn something new every hour of every work day by troubleshooting 'problems' that I have never encountered before, in so many different domains. In fact, one of my favorite things about my career path is the variety: within a week, I have the opportunity to read about recent scientific findings, disseminate my work through drafts of publications and presentations, interact with participants to collect human subject data, implement computational and statistical models, consider future studies, analyze and visualize existing and simulated data, and meet with other academics. 

How has your U-M Cognitive Science degree influenced your career path?
My Cognitive Science degree strongly oriented my research interests; I spent my post-baccalaureate years in a Developmental and Computational Cognitive Neuroscience lab, and will do the same for my graduate studies. I regularly leverage the skills that I gained from my Cognitive Science Honors Thesis, and the knowledge that I gleaned from the Cognitive Science curriculum, in my current work. For example, I implement variants of reinforcement learning models, which were taught in CogSci 200 and EECS 492.