Dr. Thakkar is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, where she directs the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory, and a licensed clinical psychologist in the state of Michigan. She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Vanderbilt University, followed by a clinical internship at the UCLA Medical Center and a postdoctoral fellowship in Clinical Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. Her research largely focuses on cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms of psychotic disorder symptoms. Much of this work uses a range of research methods (e.g. neuroimaging, eye tracking, visual psychophysics, and subjective experience reports) to identify basic perceptual and motor mechanisms that may underlie or accompany complex clinical symptoms.