Jill Kato – UC Irvine School of Social Sciences
When Allison Morehouse was in middle school, she visited UC Irvine for a community event hosted by UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND). It was the kind of outreach effort meant to connect community members with the university’s research. But for Morehouse, one moment stood out: the chance to hold a human brain in her hands.
“I must have been the only kid there,” she says. “I got to hold the brain in my hands, and I remember thinking, this is so cool. This is what it actually looks like.”
Even in elementary school, Morehouse was already poring over neuroanatomy books from her local library. Later, when she had access to a computer, she found brain surgery videos on YouTube and watched them just to understand what was really happening inside our heads.
“I just tried to learn everything I could about the brain,” she says. “I would read pop psychology books, watch videos, whatever I could find.”
Today, as a Ph.D. student in cognitive sciences at UC Irvine, what Morehouse finds most remarkable about the brain is the paradox: it’s at once universal and deeply personal. It’s biologically similar across species, yet capable of uniquely human things.
“Our brain is similar to other animal brains. But we’re this unique organism that’s built societies, made art, and created technology,” she says.
It’s this curiosity about what makes us human and how the brain supports our thoughts, memories, and emotions that drives her research.
A path built on questions
As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Morehouse initially majored in molecular cell biology with a concentration in neurobiology. But as she progressed through coursework, she found herself asking broader questions that her molecular-focused classes couldn’t answer.
“I realized I was thinking more at the systems level,” she says. “I needed to know how neurons work, but I was more interested in the behavioral outputs.”
After a conversation with a friend, she switched to cognitive science, which integrates neuroscience with philosophy, computer science, psychology, and anthropology.
“It was the perfect mix,” she says. “All these different lenses to study the same overarching question: how we think.”
At the same time, Morehouse was gaining hands-on research experience in the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley.
“That was the turning point,” she says. “I realized I didn’t want to go to medical school. What excited me was research, the creativity, the freedom to ask and answer your own questions.”
Muscle memory
Morehouse came to UC Irvine to continue her sleep research and explore how memory is formed over time.
“UCI was such a great fit,” she says. “It has this unique strength in sleep research. Most universities don’t have any sleep labs. UCI has multiple.”
Morehouse works in the Sleep and Cognition Lab led by cognitive sciences professor Sara Mednick, where her research focuses on how sleep supports emotional memory, spatial navigation, and cognitive health. One major project investigates how women’s memory and sleep change across the menstrual cycle, a topic rarely centered in neuroscience studies.
“We’re seeing that hormone changes affect sleep, and that those sleep changes are what impact emotional memory,” she says.
In another study, Morehouse uses ambulatory virtual reality to examine spatial navigation. Participants walk around a mapped environment, then either take a nap or remain awake, and are later tested on what they remember.
Mednick says she’s excited by the boldness of the questions Morehouse is asking, especially in how she designs real-world experiments to explore the brain’s complexity.
“Allison is interested in understanding sleep’s role in offline cognitive processing, specifically in complex cognitive processing,” Mednick says. “Her reasoning is that life experiences are complex and synergistically engage many cognitive domains…She has in effect created a real world, yet measurable, experience and now she can explore how sleep shapes this process.”
Morehouse’s study is designed to bridge that gap between the lab and lived experience, offering a more realistic way to examine how the brain integrates different cognitive processes during sleep.
“Most studies have people sitting at a computer,” Morehouse explains. “But real-world navigation is different. There’s a kind of muscle memory involved.”
Shared success
Morehouse credits much of her early success to the support systems around her.
“I’ve always felt comfortable going to the more senior students in the cognitive sciences department,” she says. “Everyone is so supportive. They offer to read your application materials or give you what they submitted when they applied for an award. People are really rooting for each other.”
She and other graduate students hold daily writing sessions, either in person or over Zoom, to help one another stay motivated.
“It’s a space where we can just work alongside each other and offer feedback. It makes a big difference,” she says.
Her lab is equally collaborative.
“Dr. Mednick has created this really supportive and open environment,” she says. “She challenges and believes in us. She makes sure we’re applying for opportunities and putting ourselves out there.”
Mednick echoes that praise. She says Morehouse has grown into a confident scientist with a rare combination of creativity, technical skill, and warmth.
“Allison is a natural scientist, with an excellent mixture of technical/computational ability matched with a long-standing drive to understand the human mind,” she says. “She’s also a natural leader (lab members call her The Boss) and a socially responsible person. She is the rare combination of an intellectually brilliant mind and a ridiculously fun personality. I feel very lucky to know and mentor her.”
Recognition and the road ahead
That support has helped Morehouse earn several honors. At the end of her first year, she received a fellowship from Edwards Lifesciences, which funded two quarters of research and allowed her to focus fully on a project exploring how heart rate during sleep supports emotional memory. That study became her first first-author publication, released earlier this year.
“I’d been working on that since my first week of grad school,” she says. “My family even threw a little party when it came out.”
She also received the Sleep Research Society’s Trainee Merit Award and a travel award from UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, which allowed her to present her menstrual cycle research at national conferences.
Looking ahead, Morehouse hopes to stay in academia, complete a postdoc, and one day run her own lab. She’s especially interested in continuing to explore more naturalistic, ecologically valid ways of studying the brain—through wearables, virtual reality, and multimodal research that treats people as full biological systems, not just collections of neurons.
“We can’t just study people as brains,” she says. “People are complex, and that complexity is what makes the work exciting.”
But at its core, her research is still fueled by the questions that first captivated her as a child: How does the brain work? What makes us who we are? Why does sleep shape the way we think, feel, and remember?
It’s the mystery, not just the answers, that keeps her going.