Official Bio
Lauren Richmond is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University. She attended Marist college for her BA and MA degrees and Temple University for her PhD. Prior to her appointment at Stony Brook University, Lauren was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Lauren’s research focuses on everyday memory and performance of memory-based activities across the lifespan in ecological contexts. In her research, Lauren uses behavioral, neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and eye-tracking methods. Lauren has conducted research in both healthy older adults and patient populations. Lauren’s research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging.
Unofficial Bio
Lauren Richmond is from the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA and was a shy and quiet child who generally liked books more than people. Feeling the need to ‘get out’ of Pennsylvania at the end of high school, Lauren attended a small, teaching-oriented liberal arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley. This was a somewhat unusual choice: Lauren’s family was small and tight-knit, with no one living more than a 1-hour drive away from extended family members, but her parents encouraged and supported her in going a bit further out of the box. Lauren originally chose to major in Psychology with the intention of going into clinical psychology, but quickly realized that she would not be a good clinician. Still, Lauren liked her courses and professors and thus decided to switch gears towards exploring research-oriented careers in the field. Unfortunately, at a small, teaching-oriented liberal arts school the opportunities to get involved in faculty research were few and far between. Lauren was lucky enough to land a research-oriented internship opportunity at the Nathan Kline Institute working on a neuroimaging study in patients with schizophrenia during the spring semester of her junior year in college. This experience cemented her interest in pursuing cognitive neuroscience as a career, but she needed more research experience to be a competitive PhD applicant. In order to get it, Lauren then landed a research assistant position in a neurology lab where her day-to-day involved conducting cognitive testing on adult patients with dementia. Lauren started her PhD in 2009 at Temple University in a neuroscience lab around the time of the ‘working memory training’ craze and did research in this vein throughout her PhD. Lauren then went on to a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis where she was able to gain a great deal of experience in cognitive aging and in testing memory performance in more ecological contexts, being funded first by a grant to her advisor and then by an individual NRSA. In 2018, Lauren landed back in the northeast much to the delight of her family in Pennsylvania. Outside of new faculty life, Lauren (still) enjoys reading, as well as walking her dog, cooking, and exploring her new hometown.