Biographical Info

Martina Krisztina Hollearn is a second-year Ph.D. student in the INMAN lab. She was born and raised in Hungary, then moved to California and got her BA in Psychology from California State University, Long Beach. After graduating, she was a junior research specialist in the Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, led by Dr. Michael Yassa. She was involved with several neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies using PET and MRI scans there. Her work consisted of studies about memory, aging, Alzheimer’s Disease, Down Syndrome models of Alzheimer’s Disease, and cognitive decline resiliency in adults over 90.

In graduate school at the University of Utah, Martina investigates how amygdala stimulation enhances episodic memory precision and how long this effect lasts. Additionally, she is involved in a real-world navigation project with drug-resistant epilepsy patients with implanted RNS brain stimulator systems that, in part, aims to investigate the neurophysiological signatures of event boundaries. Outside the lab, Martina engages in painting, pottery, DJing, learning piano, hiking, reading fiction thrillers to her cat, and experimenting with new recipes. As a multilingual person, one of Martina’s passions is to be an efficient science translator between Hungarian and English.

Martina’s presentation was about her journey in academia, bringing in 3D-printed brains of patients so students could hold real model brains from real patients and observe visual differences.