Faculty and Staff

Linda Doss Chrosniak

Emeritus Faculty

Dr. Chrosniak will no longer be taking in graduate students for mentorship. 

Dr. Chrosniak has been the director of the Honors Program in Psychology at GMU since 2003. She received a B.S. degree in psychology from the University of Texas at Dallas and her Ph.D. in experimental psychology from The George Washington University. Her areas of research interest include implicit and explicit memory, cognitive aging, stress and health. More recently her interests have included the interaction effects of stress and cognitive processes and their effect on health and health behaviors.

Her published work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Psychology and Aging, Journal of Geochemical Exploration, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Military Medicine.

She was nominated for a University Teaching Excellence Award in 1992 and 1999 and was a recipient of the University Teaching Excellence Award from George Mason University in 2000. She also received the Teacher of the Year Award from the GMU chapter of Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology in 2003 and 2005. She was the recipient of the BIS Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2010.

Jane M Flinn

Associate Professor

Dr. Flinn will no longer be taking in MA or PHD students for mentorship. 

Dr. Flinn’s research focuses on the role of metals in both behavior and physiology. Her research has emphasized the roles of zinc, copper and iron in learning and memory and also in macular degeneration. Her research currently focuses on two specific aspects of metals in behavior, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Her lab is developing genetically modified mice which model late onset Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of the disease and mice which contain both human amyloid and human tau. In Alzheimer’s mice, increased zinc causes an impairment in memory, which may be due to decreased copper. Current studies are examining memory, affiliative behaviors, circadian rhythms, and the role of inflammation and zinc transporters in AD mice. The work on extinction has shown that increased levels of zinc, which may act through reducing copper levels, lead to an inability to extinguish a learned fear normally, a possible factor in PTSD.

Dr. Flinn was the chair of the Department of Psychology from 1984 to 1995. During her tenure, the department was ranked as one of the most improved programs by the National Chronicle of Higher Education. After stepping down as chair, she became the coordinator of the Biopsychology concentration and developed the PhD concentration in Biopsychology (now Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN)). In 2006, she took over the newly approved undergraduate BS in Neuroscience. The first students graduated in 2009, and there are now over 200 students in the program. Dr Flinn  has received the David King Teaching Award and the University Mentoring Award.

Professional Experience

Honors and Awards

Craig McDonald

Director

Associate Professor

My lab investigates the neural underpinnings of cognitive control. More specifically, we are interested in how the brain detects and corrects for erroneous actions, enabling improved task performance. The neural correlates of error monitoring that we investigate operate in many everyday contexts such as driving, speaking, socializing and texting. My research primarily utilizes electroencephalography (EEG). Event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency analyses of rhythmic brain activity are used to provide complementary windows into the dynamic cortical activity underlying cognitive control. In collaboration with colleagues at George Mason and abroad, we are also employing a neuroergonomic approach to better understand human-AI/robot interaction.

https://cbn.gmu.edu/research/cbn-research-groups/mcdonald-lab

James C Thompson

Professor

The ability to see how other people move is essential for many aspects of daily life – from things as simple as avoiding collisions to detecting suspicious behavior or recognizing someone else's emotions. The research efforts of the Perception & Action Neuroscience Group are focused on examining how we recognize human movement and make sense of other peoples' actions. We investigate these issues using a combination of behavioral paradigms, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electroencephalography (EEG). The goal of the group’s research is to further the understanding of how we see and act with others as part of everyday life, in specialized settings such as surveillance, and in conditions in which human movement recognition may be impaired.