PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Dr. Beker joined the faculty of the Seaver Center and the departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience in March 2024. She is a faculty member of the Friedman Brain Institute and the Mindich Child Health and Development Institute. Prior to this position, Dr. Beker completed her post-doctoral fellowhip with Sophie Molholm and John Foxe at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

https://profiles.mountsinai.org/shlomit-beker

RESEARCH COORDINATOR

Julia is a Clinical Research Coordinator for the Seaver Autism Center, supporting the ongoing studies in the Beker Lab. She graduated with a B.S. in Neuroscience with a Scientific Computing minor from the University of Notre Dame in 2025. Her undergraduate work involved EEG administration to autistic and neurotypical preschoolers where she completed a thesis about the neural processing of social rewards. In the Beker Lab, she directs research examining how autistic and neurotypical individuals navigate social and physical spaces, collecting EEG, behavioral, and physiological information from individuals and dyads. She plans to work toward a Ph.D. in neuroscience with a focus in autism research.

DATA MANAGER

Amir is a Data Manager for the Seaver Autism Center, supporting the ongoing EEG / Eye tracking studies. He graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2018. Amir worked as a software engineer after graduation, and after four years in the tech industry he realized his passion for psychology. He decided to make a career shift and intends to pursue a Ph.D in clinical psychology. In the Beker Lab, he is working on automating data synthesis and visualization, and writing code to help the lab analyze EEG data in a more efficient way.

MD/MSCR STUDENT

Shaun is a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and received his undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics - Biology from Brown University in 2022. His research interests include computational and statistical neuroscience with clinical applications to Neurology and Psychiatry. He is the recipient of the Carolyn L. Kuckein Student Research Fellowship (2023), and is currently pursuing a Masters of science in clinical research through the PORTAL dual degree program at Sinai. In the Beker lab, collaborating with the Schaffer lab, Shaun is working on building machine learning classifier models to identify patients with rare genetic forms of Autism from their EEG recordings.

MSc STUDENT

Valeria is a master’s student in Biomedical Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She graduated from Cornell University in 2025 with a B.S. in Human Biology, Health, and Society. Her interests lie in neurology and endocrinology, particularly in the body’s homeostatic and regulatory systems, and she intends to pursue an MD. In the Beker Lab, she contributes to the ongoing dyad study examining physiological synchronization during social interactions in individuals diagnosed with ASD using heart rate and skin conductance data. She is currently developing a focused examination on these markers during moments of eye contact versus no eye contact to identify if patterns of autonomic regulation emerge during these intervals of social engagement.