I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also a collaborator in the Cortical Systems Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

Research Interests
I use neuroimaging  and computational methods to investigate the neural basis of language and meaning. I am interested in understanding not just where meaning is stored in the brain, but also what information these neural representations contain across various contexts and stimulus modalities. I am also interested in how semantic representations interact with word retrieval mechanisms. 

Research questions
- What is the content of stimulus- and context-invariant semantic representations?
- How does the brain flexibly modulate semantic features to support goal-oriented behavior?
- What is the interplay between semantic representations and lexical selection?

Education
I obtained my PhD at New York University where I worked in the Neuroscience of Language Lab supervised by Prof. Liina Pylkkänen.  I completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and a BA in Psychology, with a Minor in Philosophy, from the American University of Beirut. 

Contact
email: jdirani@andrew.cmu.edu