Jayden Lee, PhD
Jayden Lee, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Lee is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on the neural bases of social cognition, emotion, and decision-making in neurodegenerative disease. Her work integrates multimodal neuroimaging, neuropsychiatric measures, naturalistic paradigms, computational modeling, and neuromodulation to better understand socioemotional and behavioral dysfunction in individuals with dementia, particularly in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Lee’s research has been supported by the Alzheimer’s Association, the Vanderbilt Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center REC Scholars Program, and the National Institute on Aging. She has presented her work nationally and internationally at conferences for the Alzheimer’s Association, International Society for Frontotemporal Dementia, Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and Social and Affective Neuroscience Society among others.
Dr. Lee earned a Bachelor of Arts in Social Studies from Harvard University and received her PhD in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences from Boston University. She subsequently completed postdoctoral training at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2026.
Research Information
Dr. Lee’s research aims to identify sensitive biomarkers for socioemotional dysfunction in dementia and leverage them to guide neuromodulation-based interventions that improve patient outcomes. Her work examines changes in social cognition, empathy, emotion, trust, reward, and interpersonal behavior in individuals with dementia using structural and functional MRI, neuropsychological and behavioral measures, and machine learning methods for modeling brain-behavior relationships. Her recent work has focused on applying ecologically valid naturalistic paradigms for tracking early dysfunction in socioemotional processing to facilitate early detection of disease and novel targets for neuromodulation. Through this work, she seeks to develop personalized interventions using brain stimulation for improving socioemotional functioning and real-world behavioral outcomes in neurodegenerative disease.