Team

Dr. Zald, received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota (1997). After completing an internship in clinical neuropsychology and post-doctoral fellowship in neuroimaging, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University.  At Vanderbilt, he directed the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program for Undergraduates and served as an associate director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. He was recruited to Rutgers to start a new neuroimaging facility on the Busch campus.

Dr. Zald uses functional neuroimaging and neuropsychological techniques to examine and map the cognitive, affective and sensory functions of the orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala and the mesolimbic dopamine system. This work particularly focuses on understanding the manner in which individual differences in the functioning of these systems contributes to personality and risk for psychopathology. In recent years this work has examined the interaction of emotion and attention, the neural substrates of economic decision making, and the behavioral correlates of individual differences in dopamine. This work includes studies of impulsivity, motivation, the willingness to expend effort for rewards, and changes in dopamine with aging. A major thread of his recent work examines the neural substrates of dimensions of psychopathology, specifically factors of psychopathology that cross the boundaries of different psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Purcell received a PhD in Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience from Indiana University in 2022 following completion of clinical internship at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. His research characterizes the imbalance between cognitive processes underlying the perception of risk/uncertainty and positive valence systems subserving reward-seeking in psychosis-spectrum and affective disorders. His work has characterized this deficit across behavioral risk-taking tasks and identified aberrations in associated networks of brain regions (e.g., nucleus accumbens, insula, anterior cingulate cortex) using functional imaging in clinical and non-clinical samples.

Within CANL, his research examines the neural circuits subserving reward anticipation and pre-emptive loss-aversion (i.e., insurance) within non-clinical samples. He is also investigating the attentional processes undergirding information gathering prior to decision-making, and the effectiveness of cognitive strategies to ameliorate disadvantageous decision-making and upregulate adaptive reward-related brain activation in psychosis. Dr. Purcell additionally provides psychological assessments for those with 3q29 microdeletion syndrome, and their families, through the Rutgers Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine.

Sara is the current lab manager for the CANL. She works on the ongoing General Factor of Psychopathology in Psychosis and Severe Mental Illness and Dimensional Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 studies. She received a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Vanderbilt University in 2021.

Pariya is the current project coordinator for the Schizophrenia and Risk Decision Making study. She received a B.A. in Psychological Science and a minor in Art from Colgate University in 2024.