Julia Rathmann-Bloch
PhD Student

If you want to know more about my research, feel free to contact me.​​
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​I'm thrilled to be joining the CCC lab community as a PhD student supervised by Professor Tristan Bekinschtein and Dr. Daniel Bor. My research lies at the intersection of consciousness, aging, and neurodegenerative disease. In particular, I'm exploring the following questions: 
  • How do our experiences change as a function of age and cognitive health? Moreover, can common age-related and Alzheimer's disease-related deficits provide insight into underlying properties of consciousness?
  • As a function of age, how do transitions in conscious states affect information processing dynamics in the brain?
​Prior to joining the CCC lab in October 2024,  I graduated with a B.S. in Human Biology from Stanford University and then worked as a research coordinator in Professor Anthony Wagner's Stanford Memory Lab. 

My research is funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and supported by a St John's College Benefactors' Scholarship. ​

Current Research

Cognitive states over the lifespan

How typical or recognizable are our functional neural activity patterns as we age? Does aging affect the structure of our cognitive states? This project seeks to apply recently-developed techniques to the Cam-CAN dataset, a rich dataset of ~600 participants spanning ages 18-88, with a subset participating in longitudinal visits.

Applying information-theory tools to sleep data to predict neurodegeneration

For this project, we are setting up a collaboration with Dr. Eti Ben Simon and Professor Matthew Walker’s sleep lab at UC Berkeley. We're hoping to leverage information-theory-based tools to better understand neural complexity and information processing during the transition into sleep in the Berkeley Aging Cohort Sleep Branch.

Neurophenomenology in aging and MCI during a neurofeedback task

To better elucidate phenomenological and neural changes associated with aging and Alzheimer's disease, scientists at Bitbrain collected EEG, cognitive, and temporal experience trace data during a cognitive training neurofeedback task. Using this dataset, I aim to explore how day-to-day experiences change as a function of cognitive health in both healthy older adults and participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).