Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez is an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester. His research program in the ZVR lab aims to use virtual reality (VR), multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and machine learning to elucidate the psychological and neural signatures of PTSD and anxiety disorders, particularly to delineate the contextual aspect of threat and reward learning, discrimination, and monitoring.

Suarez-Jimenez is specifically interested in cases where an area within a larger environment becomes associated with threat, such as the area of a neighborhood where an assault or assaults took place, or location on a battlefield where explosions occurred. Patients with PTSD and anxiety disorders often show an overgeneralization or an exaggerated response to threat in larger contexts, even in environments predicting safety. With this research, he plans to identify new brain measures to develop sensitive, personalized, and precise diagnostic and treatment tools for psychology.

Suarez-Jimenez came to the University in January 2021. He is an active member of the Neuroscience Diversity Commission and has served as a mentor for the NEUROCITY program. And he recently received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to build upon work in the ZVR lab.

For more information on Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez, visit his Voices of XR page. Please register to attend his talk. 
 

A Zoom link will be emailed to participants closer to the event. 
 

The Voices of XR speaker series is made possible by University Life Trustee Kathy McMorran Murray ʼ74 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Traineeship (NRT) program as part of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Training in the Science, Technology, and Applications of Augmented and Virtual Reality at the University of Rochester (#1922591).