2011–2023
Memory research, teaching, and mentorship
Peer-reviewed work on how acute stress shapes memory, alongside university teaching and graduate research mentorship.
- Status
- Completed earlier in my career
- Evidence
- Independently documented
- Claims checked
The through-line from this period to the work I do now is not the subject matter. It is the habit of treating an inconsistent result as information about the conditions rather than as a failure of the measurement.
The situation
Whether acute stress helps or harms memory matters well beyond the laboratory — for how eyewitness testimony is weighed, how students are assessed, and how clinicians interpret what a patient can recall. The published literature disagreed with itself. Some studies found stress impairing memory, others found it enhancing memory, and the disagreement had persisted long enough to look like a stalemate.
My role
I designed and ran experiments on acute stress, episodic memory, and executive function; first-authored a review of post-encoding stress effects; co-authored a meta-analysis of the broader literature; taught full university courses through to final grades; and mentored undergraduate and graduate researchers through their own projects.
The initial assumption
The obvious reading was that the inconsistency was noise — small samples, varied procedures, and publication pressure producing a scatter of results that would eventually average out.
What the evidence changed
Aggregating the literature systematically showed the opposite. The disagreement was structured rather than random: effects depended on when the stress occurred relative to learning, and on whether the material being remembered was related to the stressor itself. What had looked like contradictory findings resolved into boundary conditions, which is a considerably more useful result than a single averaged effect.
Record / 1
What was produced
- Peer-reviewed empirical papers on stress, episodic memory, and executive function
- A first-authored review of post-encoding stress and glucocorticoid effects on episodic memory
- A co-authored meta-analysis and integrative review of acute stress and episodic memory
- University courses taught end to end, including curriculum development
- Mentorship of undergraduate and graduate researchers through their own studies
Record / 2
Evidence available
- The peer-reviewed publications are indexed on PubMed and listed under my ORCID record
- The UC Davis Memory and Plasticity Program publicly credits me and my peers for curriculum development and mentorship
- Course records and student evaluations exist for the institutions where I taught
Credibility requires a boundary
Limits
This is completed work, not a current research program. I left academia in 2023, hold no current university affiliation, and have not maintained an academic publication schedule since — I was pursuing different work. The publication portfolio is small relative to a continuously active academic career, though it has been widely cited. Public citation services disagree materially on totals, so I do not publish an aggregate figure. Student ratings on public sites are strongly positive but come from small, self-selected samples and should not be read as a teaching effectiveness statistic. Academic results are evidence of research judgment and follow-through; they are not evidence of enterprise consulting or production engineering experience.
Transferable value
Reading a contested evidence base and working out where the disagreement is real and where it is an artifact of method. Designing studies capable of answering the question actually asked. And explaining the result to people who need to act on it without a background in the field.