Samuel M. Maione

Professional summary. I graduated from SUNY Binghamton in 2023 with a BSc in Integrative Neuroscience, where I earned the Steven W. Kovacs Memorial Award and Undergraduate Research Award for my passion towards psychological research as a volunteer research assistant in Dr. Peter Gerhardstein’s lab. After graduating, I joined Dr. Shari Liu’s lab at Johns Hopkins University as a full-time laboratory technician / lab manager. Here, we study the way people navigate the social and physical world through neuroimaging, behavioral tests, and developmental studies. While working in the Liulab, I worked with my undergraduate lab to turn my honors thesis into a publication that was recently accepted in Frontiers of Neurology. Currently, I am working on a first authored paper with Dr. Liu tests whether human intuitive physical reasoning and goal directed attention rely on shared or distinct neural resources.

Research summary. Institutions are structured, hierarchical social groups where each member occupies a ‘role’ in service of a broader institutional goal. These roles persist beyond the individual occupying them. Someone can leave their role at an institution, but the role is still available for the next individual to occupy it (for example, someone could leave their role as a ‘cashier’, but this concept of a cashier and all it entails does not leave with the individual). I am interested in the ways people think about institutions, and specifically, the ways in which our understanding of institutions changes (1) our behavior and (2) our perceptions of the world.