*** Dr. Vendemia is accepting students for Fall 2022 ***

Education

Dr. Vendemia received her Ph.D. in Experimental Cognitive Neuroscience from Virginia Tech in 1999. During her graduate career she worked for eight years as the psychology liaison to the spinal cord trauma evaluation team at the Veteran’s Hospital in Roanoke, Virginia. Her dissertation research involved the effects of stress on EEG correlates of cognitive performance and pain perception. During her graduate career she also had the opportunity to work with Helen Crawford on NASA sponsored research involving attention styles in fighter pilots and studies of chronic and acute pain perception.

Research

Dr. Vendemia’s current research follows multiple threads which interweave deceptive behaviors, executive functions, memory, and emotional processes. Deception represents an extraordinarily complicated social behavior that recruits multiple regions of the brain. Studies suggest that while some regions of the brain are consistently activated independent of the situational context of the deception other regions are recruited exclusively in certain situations.

She is frequently consulted by government agencies including the Office of Scientific Technology of the President, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, various military organizations as well as other organizations within the Department of Defense. In 2005 she testified in front of the U.S. Senate on behalf of the American Psychological Association.

The focus of her current research incorporates the relationship of stress to brain activation during cognitive performance. She has conducted research on fMRI correlates of acute- and chronic-stress due to Perceived Racism in African-Americans as well as EEG research examining the effects of extended incarceration on death row inmates. Her current research involves cognitive modeling of deceptive behavior combining evidence from HD-EEG and fMRI measures. Her research was continuously funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense from 2000-2012. She now has theprivilege of heading the NSF funded Summer Research Experience in Brain and Cognitive Science.