About
I am a Hungarian-American cognitive neuroscientist specializing in memory, anatomy, epilepsy, and aging and dementia. Alongside my formal education in psychology and later neuroscience, I worked as a waitress in several restaurants to put myself through school. Most of my family still lives in Hungary, but I spent almost a decade helping the family who came with me to America, including caring for my grandfather through his Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. His condition, and my father’s memory issues following a brain injury, made my curiosity about memory impossible to ignore — and I found a lab at the University of California, Irvine that nurtured that curiosity into a career.
My Hungarian high school grades didn’t transfer, so I started over at Long Beach City College before working my way to a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Utah. Along the way I balanced what many immigrant, first-generation college students do: working full time, caring for family, and building a path toward a better life through education. Only one member of my family speaks enough English to get by, and most have never set foot in the U.S., so I often needed mentorship to keep pursuing my goals. My mentors at California State University, Long Beach helped me get involved in behavioral and personality research and animal models of anxiety. Then, inspired by my grandfather’s diagnosis, I moved into Alzheimer’s research — which eventually led me to work with human intracranial electrophysiology and some of the most advanced tools in neuroscience, including direct brain stimulation.
Science, Service & Life Outside the Lab
I’m a committed advocate for science communication and have volunteered in outreach for over seven years, starting in senior centers where I organized free events on memory and aging. When I moved to Salt Lake City for graduate school, I took over my department’s outreach program and grew it across the greater Salt Lake area. Some of my most fulfilling graduate school memories come from being challenged by older adults on why we haven’t cured Alzheimer’s yet, or getting applause from a room of teenage boys at a youth detention center after showing them 3D-printed brains and talking through how memories form.
Wanting to do even more for my community, I began fostering near-feral cats and volunteering at the Wildlife Center of Salt Lake — work that has its own place on this site.
When I’m not volunteering, I’m usually doing yoga, boxing, meditating, reading, painting, playing video games, hiking, or out with a camera.
Becoming an Artist
One of my most recent dreams has come true: being a recognized artist. I’ve started printing my photography on metal canvases and have shown my work at coffee shops and galleries across multiple states. Every print sold benefits the Wildlife Center of Salt Lake — see the full Artwork collection.