Stephanie Leal
moattari
Assistant Professor
Primary Area: Behavioral Neuroscience
Home Department: Integrative Biology & Physiology
Address: LSB 2802
Phone: (310) 267-5607
Email: stephanieleal@ucla.edu
Lab Website: https://memory.ibp.ucla.edu
Research and Teaching Interests:
Dr. Leal’s laboratory performs basic and translational research to understand how our memory system works and how this system goes awry in memory and mood disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression. She utilizes state-of-the-art high-resolution imaging techniques, PET imaging of amyloid and tau pathologies, and novel experimental paradigms to understand brain-behavior relationships in humans. Dr. Leal has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Memory, The Neuroscience of Aging, and Functional Neuroanatomy.
Biography:
Dr. Stephanie Leal is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology & Physiology at UCLA, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at Rice University, and Director of the Neuroscience of Memory, Mood, & Aging Laboratory. She received her B.S. in Biopsychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011 and her Ph.D. in Psychological & Brain Sciences from Johns Hopkins University in 2016 working in the lab of Dr. Michael Yassa. She completed postdoctoral training from 2016-2019 at the University of California, Berkeley with Dr. William Jagust. Her research interests focus on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying episodic memory processing and how these mechanisms are altered in aging and disease states. She develops and utilizes sensitive cognitive tasks, advanced neuroimaging techniques, and translates these methods to states of cognitive impairment. Her overarching goal is to understand the factors that modulate episodic memory processing in order to restore the system to normal function in disorders of mood and memory.
Curriculum Vitae
Representative Publications:
Morales-Calva, F.** & Leal, S.L. (2025). Tell me why: The missing w in episodic memory’s what, where, and when. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Clark, K. & Leal, S.L. (2025). Fine-tuning the details: Post-encoding music differentially impacts general and detailed memory. The Journal of Neuroscience.
Phillips, T.*, Castro, M.**, Vas, R.*, Ferguson, L.A.**, Harikumar, A., & Leal, S.L. (2023). Perceived antidepressant efficacy associated with reduced negative and enhanced neutral mnemonic discrimination. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17, 1225836.
Leal, S.L. & Yassa, M.Y. (2018). Integrating new findings and examining clinical applications of pattern separation. Nature Neuroscience, 21(2), 163–173.
Leal, S.L., Landau, S.M., Bell, R.K., & Jagust, W.J. (2017). Hippocampal activation is associated with longitudinal amyloid accumulation and cognitive decline. eLife, 6, e22978.
Leal, S.L., Tighe, S.K., Jones, C.K., & Yassa, M.A. (2014). Pattern separation of emotional information in hippocampal dentate/CA3. Hippocampus, 24, 1146–1155.