Caterina Gratton.

Caterina Gratton, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has joined the Beckman Institute.

Gratton earned her B.S. in psychology and neuroscience from Illinois and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Neurology Department at Washington University in St. Louis.

Gratton’s research focuses on the organization and function of human brain networks and how they contribute to goal-directed cognition. She is interested in how these systems vary across people and the lifespan. She uses a multifaceted approach, adopting a variety of human brain imaging methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging and recordings from patients to study how brain systems function and change. Gratton was named an American Psychological Society “Rising Star” in honor of this work.

Gratton joins the Brain Connectivity and Networks Working Group at the Beckman Institute and will collaborate with fellow psychology professor Sepideh Sadaghiani, Brad Sutton, the technical director of Beckman's Biomedical Imaging Center, and others.

"I’m thrilled to be joining the Beckman community," Gratton said. "It is the perfect place for the interdisciplinary research we do in my lab, and I am excited about the opportunity to build interactions with other folks in neuroscience, psychology, statistics and bioengineering. These interactions can help spur new methods development and keep us at the cutting edge of the field."