Lea Stith graduated from UC Irvine with a B.S. in Psychology (concentration in Cognitive Neuroscience) and a minor in Biological Sciences with Departmental Honors. As an undergrad, she worked in Dr. Michael Yassa’s Translational Neuroscience Laboratory as a Research Assistant starting her freshman year, and completed her honors thesis in the lab. Her thesis work was on devising a new assessment for individuals who have Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).
Post-graduation, she began interning in Dr. Sofie Valk’s Cognitive Neurogenetics Group with the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, working on a project to segment the locus coeruleus from high-resolution MRI and histological images. She also interned at the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging in the summer of 2021, working on her project which investigated hemispheric asymmetries of tau deposition in early stages of cognitive decline.
Currently, she is working as a Junior Research Specialist in Dr. Yassa’s Translational Neuroscience Lab and is involved with several projects, such as research on mood disorders, Alzheimer’s disease in Down’s syndrome, and early life adversities. She is also continuing her research on HSAM, and is working on solving the questions she began investigating during her undergrad studies. In graduate school, she would like to continue working with neuroimaging topics in human cognitive neuroscience.
In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, yoga, hiking, volunteering at a local horse rescue, and spending time with friends and family.