Jacqueline Boccanfuso

M.A. student

Max Planck Institute Tuebingen,Germany

Biography:

Born in Italy, Jacqueline moved with her mother to Berkeley, California at the age of two. She then moved up and down the California coastline before settling in San Diego for her undergraduate work at UCSD in cognitive neuroscience. While at UCSD, she investigated the affects of stimulus presentation and variation on P300 and SSVEP based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems in Dr. Jaime Pineda’s Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

Instead of applying directly to medical school after graduation, Jacqueline moved to Germany to be a research assistant in Prof. Dr. Niels Birbaumer’s BCI group in the Institute for Medical Psychology at the University of Tuebingen. She soon realized that her heart was really in research, not medicine, and enrolled as a Master’s student in the Graduate School for Neural and Behavioural Sciences at the Max Planck International Research School for the University of Tuebingen.

Jacqueline returned to the Bay Area in November 2008 to conduct her Master’s thesis project in Dr. Adam Gazzaley’s lab under Dr. Peter Wais where she will look at the impact of distraction on long-term memory retrieval in cognitive aging. Jacqueline plans to further her graduate education in neuroscience.