Behind Your Behavior

Episode Two of the Behind Your Profession Season, where we where we interview guests from various professions and discuss how they got to their current position. Our guest today is Rohit Malrani, Entrepreneur & Co-Founder of OfficeHours!

As OfficeHours hits its one year, we talk with co-founder Rohit Malrani all things finance and career coaching. Rohit is a graduate of Northeastern University. Formerly a growth equity investor at Battery Ventures and an early employee at SourceScrub, Rohit has recently started a mental-health oriented career coaching business, called OfficeHours. Hear his journey through the world of finance and how his experiences led him to his current position helping analysts plan out their careers!

Learn more about OfficeHours here: https://www.getofficehours.com/

Welcome back to the Behind Your Behavior podcast! This is the first episode of our new season, Behind Your Profession, where we interview guests from various professions and discuss how they got to their current position. Our first guest is one of the nation's foremost interior designers, Taniya Nayak! 

Taniya Nayak has been regularly featured as host and interior designer on HGTV and as well as Food Network's Restaurant Impossible and ABC’s The Great Christmas Light Fight. A native of India, this Boston-based designer is known for creating hot new restaurants and high end residential projects all over the US. Her latest design projects include Yellow Door Taqueria, Lion’s Tail, and several new Ruth’s Chris Steak House restaurants across the country. She has designed for celebrities Ayesha Curry, Robert Irvine, Cam Neely and more. Taniya successfully owns her design firm Taniya Nayak Design, Inc based in Boston and is co-owner to several restaurants in the Boston area with her husband Brian O’Donnell.

Taniya Nayak's website: https://taniyanayak.com/

Join Tina and Roshni as they close out Season One! The cousins discuss their research backgrounds, reflect on the season and their amazing guests, and give a sneak peak of what’s coming next.

Be sure to follow along on twitter and instagram (@TheBYBPodcast) to share your thoughts on this past season and what you want to hear in the future! We may have merchandise coming out soon as well, so don't miss out! Thanks for listening!

This episode explores Phenylketonuria & Child Development, with our guest Dr. Adele Diamond. We discuss her previous discoveries regarding the disease PKU, research on children with ADHD, as well as her current work exploring three core executive functions. 

Episode Notes: Piaget's A-not-B task was developed in 1935, the same year as the delayed response task was developed. The main difference between these tasks is that in delayed response, the reward that is hidden on each trial is randomly determined, whereas in A-not-B the reward is always hidden on the same side until the participant is correct twice in a row, then the hiding place is switched to the other side. Dr. Diamond additionally would like to add that there is a connection between her PKU work and ADHD work, because both are based on the dopamine system in the prefrontal cortex having unique properties. In PKU, it is that the PFC dopamine systems turn over dopamine at a faster rate. In ADHD, the PFC dopamine system has a dearth of the dopamine transporter. 

For more information on the Piaget A-not-B task, delayed response task, and PKU (pdf)

For information on special properties of the PFC dopamine system underlying her PKU and ADHD work: For Neuroscientists: (pdf); For the General Public: (pdf)

This episode explores Habits with our guest, Dr. Colin Camerer. We discuss the intersection of neuroscience and economics, neural 'autopilot', and why this is the golden age of social science. 

Professor Colin F. Camerer is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology, where he teaches cognitive psychology and economics. Professor Camerer earned a Bachelors degree in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins, a MBA in finance, and a Ph.D. in decision theory from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before coming to Caltech in 1994, Dr. Camerer worked at the Kellogg, Wharton, and University of Chicago business schools. He studies both behavioral and experimental economics. 

This episode explores Split-Second Perception with our guest, Dr. Jon Freeman. We discuss the use of his software MouseTracker to investigate implicit biases, how these biases affect our perception of others, and what can be done to mitigate them. 

Jon Freeman is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University and director of the Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab. He received his Ph.D. from Tufts University and was on the faculty at Dartmouth before coming to NYU in 2014. His research focuses on how we perceive other people, such as how we categorize others into social groups, infer their emotion or personality via facial cues, and more generally how we understand and react to our social world. His work examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying person perception, stereotyping and decision-making in social contexts. He takes an integrative, multi-level approach that makes use of several techniques, including functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral paradigms. He is also the developer of the data collection and analysis software, MouseTracker.

Dr. Freeman is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Janet T. Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, the Early Career Award from the Society for Social Neuroscience, the SAGE Young Scholars Award from the Society for Personality & Social Psychology, and the Early Career Award from the International Social Cognition Network. His work has appeared in media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and TIME Magazine.

This episode explores Happiness & Decision-Making with our guest, Dr. Robb Rutledge. We discuss his lab's equation for happiness, the subjective nature of happiness, and how our emotions play a role in decision-making. 

Dr. Robb Rutledge has a BSc from Caltech and a PhD in Neural Science from New York University where he worked with Paul Glimcher. He was a postdoctoral fellow at University College London with Ray Dolan and Peter Dayan before joining the faculty of University College London. This summer, his lab moved to Yale University. His lab combines computational models, brain scanning, and pharmacology to study decision making and affective states like happiness in healthy and clinical populations of all ages. 

This episode explores space, time, and fear with our guest, Dr. Dean Mobbs. We explore what 'fear' can be defined as, ecologically valid testing paradigms, as well as the spirit of the academic community. 

Dr. Dean Mobbs is interested in the intersection of behavioral ecology, economics, emotion, and social psychology. By understanding the neural, computational and behavioral dynamics of human social and emotional experiences, he wants to develop theoretical models that merge those fields. Using brain-imaging, computational modeling and behavioral techniques, his lab is probing the neurobiological systems responsible for fear and anxiety, revealing how people learn to control their fears, and how anxiety and psychiatric disorders disrupt those processes. He's interested in the value of social behavior. In particular, he's trying to determine the behavioral and neural signatures behind positive social interactions—for example, those involved with altruism, empathy, and when viewing others' success as rewarding (vicarious reward and reflected glory). His research also focuses on the interplay between social interaction and emotion—how fear can depend on whether you're alone or in a group (e.g. risk dilution).

This episode explores The Emotional Brain with our guest, Dr. Joseph LeDoux. We discuss how the field of neuroscience has changed, some of Dr. LeDoux's previous research, as well as the role of the amygdala in the brain. 

Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU in the Center for Neural Science, and he directs the Emotional Brain Institute of NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute. He also a Professor of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical School. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion and he is the author of The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, and Anxious. LeDoux has received a number of awards, including William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science, the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, the Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science, Jean Louis Signoret Prize of the IPSEN Foundation, the Santiago Grisolia Prize, the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and the American Psychological Association Donald O. Hebb Award. His book Anxious received the 2016 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. LeDoux is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids and performs with Colin Dempsey as the acoustic duo So We Are. 

This episode discusses Neuroscience in Law: The Rise of NeuroTech with Amanda Pustilnik. We discuss chronic pain in the law, new technologies in neuroscience, and neuroethics. 

Amanda C. Pustilnik is the director of the Project on Law and Pain at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Law, Brain & Behavior and Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School Carey of Law, where she teaches neuroscience and law, forensic evidence, and special topics in law and science. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, science, and culture, with a particular emphasis on the brain.

She has worked extensively on questions of pain in law, convening cross-disciplinary conferences and collaborations involving pain scientists, legal scholars, and bioethicists. She currently is serving on a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering focused on chronic pain disorders, and, in 2017, authored the legal report of the Aspen Institute’s Report on Opioids in America. In 2015, she served as Harvard Law School’s first senior fellow in law and applied neuroscience, with an emphasis on pain-related disorders and their legal status.