Dr. Melissa Allman

Biography

Melissa Allman received her Ph.D. in 2004 from Cardiff University, Wales, UK, specializing in behavioral neuroscience. Her research primarily focuses on understanding various learning processes in rodents through Pavlovian studies, particularly mediated conditioning, where she examined how stimuli are remembered and the effects of generalization and discrimination. After her doctoral studies, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, working with children with disorders related to the brain and spinal cord at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in the department of Behavioral Psychology. Her postdoctoral work involved projects addressing inpatient children with autism and developmental disabilities, utilizing operant behavior principles to develop treatments for aberrant behaviors. Additionally, she has participated in neuroimaging projects that explored the cognitive and behavioral processing in both children with autism and typically developing adults across various tasks. Currently, as a recipient of the NICHD Pathway Independence (K99) award, her research investigates interval timing in autism and the hypothesis of temporal deficits that characterize the disorder. She is particularly interested in the neural and behavioral aspects of timing across the lifespan and how subjective experiences of time may differ in clinical populations. Through her broad research experiences, she emphasizes collaborative work within the Neuroscience program and aims to address the intersections of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, especially as they relate to learning and psychopathology.

Research Interests

Experience