Team | Foss-Feig Laboratory

Principal Investigator

Jennifer Foss-Feig, PhD
Departmental website
Jennifer Foss-Feig, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Williams College, holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt University, and completed her clinical internship and postdoctoral training at the Yale Child Study Center. Dr. Foss-Feig’s research interests are in sensory and perceptual processing, particularly as they relate to possible underlying mechanisms of and biomarker development for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She studies auditory, visual, and multisensory processing, with a particular interest in temporal processing deficits and testing for markers of excitatory/inhibitory imbalance. She also examines the overlap between autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), including schizophrenia, and works in monogenic NDDs (e.g., Phelan McDermid Syndrome (PMS), FOXP1 Syndrome) that confer risk for ASD but have known etiology that maps to testable and targetable circuit-based alterations. Dr. Foss-Feig’s research combines EEG, fMRI, and psychophysical approaches with clinical and behavioral assessments to explore brain-behavior relations and identify underlying alterations that may be targeted with pharmacological or psychosocial intervention. Her work testing neural mechanisms across ASD and schizophrenia seeks to identify shared versus dissociable markers that could be useful as stratification tools for predicting risk for psychosis in ASD populations. Across her research, Dr. Foss-Feig seeks to use paradigms that map to known biological alterations, are objective and reliable, and are feasible or adaptable for individuals with NDDs across the functioning spectrum. Dr. Foss-Feig has received funding from NIMH, Autism Speaks, Autism Science Foundation, the Marino Autism Research Institute, the Simons Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation for her research. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of New York.

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Kayleigh Kangas-Dick, PhD
Kayleigh Kangas-Dick, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and
Treatment at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She completed her Bachelor’s degree at the
University Connecticut and holds a PhD in school psychology from Columbia University. Kayleigh
completed her predoctoral clinical internship at JCCA Foster Home Services in the Bronx. Research
interests focus on investigating relationships among parent and child factors as they may relate to
parenting behavior and child psychological functioning, with particular interest in neurodevelopmental
disorders. In collaboration with and under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Foss-Feig, current research
efforts involve investigating the clinical utility of a new measure designed to capture ASD symptom
heterogeneity, as this may allow for better precision in clinical diagnostics, while facilitating more
targeted, data-driven treatments and progress monitoring.

Graduate Student

Sarah Banker
Sarah Banker graduated from Wesleyan University in 2017 with a BA in Neuroscience and Behavior. After college, she worked as a Research Assistant at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. During this time, Sarah used neuroimaging to study the neural correlates of cognitive and affective behaviors in children with learning disabilities. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is co-mentored by Dr. Jennifer Foss-Feig, Dr. Daniela Schiller, and Dr. Xiaosi Gu. Sarah’s graduate thesis focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms of aberrant social behavior and decision-making in psychiatric disease. Specifically, her research aims to combine computational modeling, human neuroimaging, and clinical assessment to examine impairments in social interaction in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Misophonia.