Jacqueline Boccanfuso

Address:
600 16th Street, MC 2240
Genentech Hall, GH-N474
San Francisco, CA  94158

e-mail:  jacqueline@gazzaleylab.ucsf.edu
lab:  415-476-2164
fax:  415-502-1655

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. Currently, Jacqueline is interested in learning and cognitive training in a healthy aging population and hopes to incorporate the use of BCI systems in cognitive training.  She plans to further her graduate education in cognitive neuroscience.

Publications:

Wais, P., Rubens, M., Boccanfuso, J. & Gazzaley, A. (2010). Neural mechanisms underlying the impact of visual distraction on retrieval of long-term memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 30. 8541-8550. [PDF]