Clara A. Sava-Segal
PhD Candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience
Dartmouth College
Research Focus
How and why do two people "see" (interpret) and remember the same experience so differently?
Using neuroimaging and behavioral methods, I investigate how we integrate incoming information with existing knowledge and how this differs meaningfully at the individual level. Specifically, I study how two people—or the same person at different times—can reach different perceptions of identical information, and how these differences shape memory.
I am a Cognitive Neuroscience PhD candidate advised by Emily Finn at Dartmouth College, working in the Functional Imaging and Naturalistic Neuroscience Lab (FINN Lab). I am currently funded by an NIMH F31 NRSA Fellowship and was previously supported by an NSF GRFP. I am finishing up this spring and will be starting a postdoc this fall.
Background
I earned my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, where I studied a combination of psychology, neurobiology, and human development, and completed my undergraduate thesis with Daniel Casasanto. I also worked with Christopher Gomez and in the Awh-Vogel Lab. Following graduation, I worked as a lab manager and research assistant at Stanford in Josef Parvizi’s lab. My training spans electrophysiology, functional network dynamics, and the cognitive neuroscience of symbolic systems. In my PhD work, I have tended to favor more "naturalistic" paradigms, but I also try to balance the richness of real-world stimuli with the experimental control needed to isolate specific mechanisms. I hope to continue to do that in future work.
Beyond Research
I’m passionate about science communication and public education. Prior to graduate school, I did medical editing and worked in classrooms at both ends of the K–12 spectrum (Pre-K and 12th grade). More recently, I’ve designed and taught 5+ discussion-based neuroscience and psychology courses for adult learners (ages 50+) at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Dartmouth — an experience I’ve found incredibly rewarding.
I also enjoy bridging science and the arts, and many of my research questions apply directly to the real world. For instance, we created ArtLibs, a collaborative project with the Hood Museum at Dartmouth where we get to explore these ideas outside the lab, funded by an internal Arts Integration Grant.