Lab director


Choong-Wan Woo (or Wani Woo)
email github twitter youtube youtube


Choong-Wan (Wani) is the director of the Cocoan lab. His research focuses on understanding how the human brain represents, processes, and regulates pain and emotions using machine learning and computational modeling. He received his dual PhD in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute of Cognitive Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder (PhD advisor: Tor D. Wager), and MA in Clinical psychology and BS in Biology from Seoul National University. He has received many awards including the Scitech Korea Young Neuroscientist Award from the Korean Society for Brain and Neural Sciences (한국뇌신경과학회, 2023), the Top 100 R&D achievements from the government (국가연구개발 우수성과 100선, 과기정통부, 2022), Kim Chan Award from the Korean Pain Research Society (대한통증연구회, 2022), Outstanding Achievement Award from the Korean Society for Human Brain Mapping (학술상, 대한뇌기능매핑학회, 2021), Jaeil Kim Young Scholar Paper Award from the Korean Psychological Association (한국심리학회, 2019). Currently, he is an associate director of the IBS Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (뇌과학이미징연구단), an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) and also the BK21-FOUR funded department of Intelligent Precision Healthcare Convergence (IPHC) at SKKU.

CV | Google Scholar | 브라보 K-사이언티스트 | IBS인터뷰1 2 | 한빛사인터뷰1 2 | 성균웹진


Postdoctoral fellows


Lada Kohoutová
email personal website


Lada is a postdoc in the Cocoan lab. She first joined the lab as a post-master research assistant in summer 2017 after completing her master’s and bachelor’s degrees at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague. In spring 2019 she started her PhD studies in the lab, and graduated in winter 2023. She is broadly interested in geometry and computational mechanism of pain and emotion processing in the brain. Her current research focus is on the effects of pain on visual processing.





Jae-joong Lee
email


Jaejoong is a postdoc in the Cocoan lab. He is interested in the individualized brain representations of experimental and clinical sustained pain. He received his M.D. from Hanyang University in 2017, and joined the Cocoan lab as a graduate student. He received Ph.D. from Sungkyunkwan University in 2023.

CV





Graduate students


Suhwan Gim
email github twitter


Suhwan is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. He received B.A. in psychology at Sungkyunkwan University. His research interest is to understand how psychological health and biological factors influence each other. He is eager to answer the question of how the environment (e.g., personal background, contexts, cultures, etc.) affects subjective experience of pain and its brain activity.

CV




Hong Ji Kim
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Hong Ji is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. During undergrad, she double-majored in Biological science and Psychology. She is currently interested in understanding the links between neuroscience and social psychology, especially human motivation such as belonging motivation, self, intrinsic motivation, and regulatory fit. Understanding differences in neural representations of different types of pain–e.g., psychological, social, and physical–is also her interest.






Soo Ahn Lee
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Soo Ahn is a graduate student in Cocoan Lab. She majored in psychology at Sungkyunkwan University, and she worked as an undergrad RA in Cocoan Lab from June 2017 to August 2018. She is interested in developing brain models of neural representation of pain and pleasure using fMRI. She aims to investigate the shared neurobiological mechanisms between pain and pleasure, which would be the brain underpinnings of human affective experiences.







Sungwoo Lee
email github twitter


Sungwoo is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. He joined the lab as a postbac RA 2018 summer and entered the graduate school 2019 summer. He received B.A. in Psychology at Catholic University of Korea and is taking another B.S. course in Computer science and Statistics at Korea National Open University. He is interested in deep learning and computational models of pain and emotions. He is currently leading a project, called the Midnight Pain Club!






Jungwoo Kim
email github


Jungwoo is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. He joined the lab as a postbac RA 2019 spring and entered the graduate school 2020 spring. He majored systems biology and minored philosophy at Yonsei University. He is interested in computational basis of emotion and pain. His ultimate goal is to find computational motifs of our psyhcological constructs that can substitute lingual representation.







Jihoon Han
email github


Jihoon is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. He joined the lab as an undergrad RA at 2018 summer and entered the graduate school 2020 spring. He majored in Computer Sciences at the Hongik University. He previously worked with Prof. Yongseok Yoo at the Brain & Information Lab in Incheon University. His research interests include computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence (esp. deep learning models).







Youngeun Park
email


Youngeun is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. She joined the Cocoan lab as a post-bachelor research assistant in fall 2021 and started a graduate study in spring 2022. She received her BS in Biology and Psychology at Gordon College. Before joining the Cocoan lab, she worked at a pharmaceutical company to experience clinical applications of science. She is interested in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, particularly understanding pain and psychiatric disorders using neuroimaging.







Eui Jin Jung
email


Eui Jin is a graduate student in the Cocoan lab. She joined the lab as a post-bachelor research assistant in the fall of 2022 and started a graduate study in the spring of 2023. She holds a B.A. in psychology and big-data humanage from the Catholic University of Korea, and her research interests revolve around emotions from cognitive, affective, and clinical neuroscience perspectives. Specifically, her research focus is on music-induced analgesia and she aims to further her investigations in this field with the ultimate goal of commercializing music as a treatment method in the future.






Yuseon Park
email


Yuseon is a post-bachelor research assistant in the Cocoan lab since winter 2022. He majored in Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology). He wants to understand the underlying mechanism of emotion and pain. He is also interested in dynamic connectivity of brain.








Sohee Kim
email


Sohee is a post-bachelor research assistant in the Cocoan lab since spring 2023. During undergrad, she double majored in Department of Medical Biotechnology and Bio-Software at Kangwon National University. She is broadly interested in artificial intelligence and computational models of emotions. She also wants to study neuroscience and neuroimaging to improve people’s health.







Research staff


Dong Hee Lee
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Dong Hee is a post-master’s research assistant in the Cocoan lab. He joined the lab as a postbac RA 2019 spring and entered the graduate school 2020 spring. He double majored in Consumer & Family Science and Data Science at Sungkyunkwan University. He is broadly interested in cognitive science, computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence.







Jinhee Lee
email


Jinhee is a post-master’s research assistant in the Cocoan lab since fall 2023. She received her M.S. in Neurobiology from the Department of Dental Science, Seoul National University. She is interested in understanding how emotions are processed and regulated in the human brain.







Jung In Lee
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Jung In is an Undergrad Research Assistant in the Cocoan lab since November 2023. She is majoring in philosophy and psychology at Yonsei University. She is interested in identifying neuronal biomarkers and constructing cognitive & neurobiological mechanisms of psychiatric disorders, especially depression. She aims to improve various computational skills and neuroimaging methods.







Anel Zhunussova
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Anel joined the Cocoan lab as a post-bachelor research assistant in February 2024 after obtaining a double major degree in biomedical engineering (B.Sc.) and business administration (B.A.) at UNIST. During her undergraduate years, aiming to gain research experience, she interned at Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences and Harvard Medical School, which in turn sparked her interest for integrating affective neuroscience with neuroimaging and predictive modeling. Now, she is particularly fascinated with understanding the underlying mechanisms of tonic pain, its clinical implications, and the potential of precision functional mapping techniques in the field.







Undergraduate students


Jaewon Yoo

Jae Won is an undergraduate research assistant in the Cocoan Lab. She is majoring in Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University. She is interested in data science, statistics, and neuroscience. Also, she has a passion to study machine learning and reinforcement learning with various AI tools








Joobin Cha
email


Joobin is an Undergrad Research Assistant in the Cocoan lab since the spring of 2023. She is majoring in psychology at Sungkyunkwan University. She has a broad interest in the mechanisms of emotion and its link to other constructs such as pain. She also aims to study various methods that can be used to study how emotion carries out in the brain.








Jaehyuk Bae
email


Jaehyuk is undergraduate research assistant in the Cocoan Lab from february 2023. He is majoring in Global Biomedical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University. He is interested in machine learning including DL and RL, and also broadly in some psychological symptoms and cognitive neuroscience.








Chaeyoon Shin
email


Chaeyoon is an Undergrad Research Assistant in the Cocoan lab since December 2023. She is majoring in Integrative Biotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University. She is interested in both the computational and molecular aspects of neuroscience. She wishes to further improve her knowledge in machine learning and neuroimaging methods.








Youngsoul Kim
email


Youngsoul, majoring in Biomedical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, joined the Cocoan lab in Feb. 2024 as an undergraduate research assistant. Her main interest lies in the study of leveraging music as a tool for analyzing human intelligence with a focus on the processes and principles by which music can induce intended emotions. She is also interested in artificial intelligence.








Visiting scholars


Hakin Kim
email


Hakin is a visiting student in the Cocoan lab since summer 2023. He is a graduate student in the Clinical Neuroscience of anxiety and depression lab in Yonsei University. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Yonsei University. He is broadly interested in how interrelationships between emotional and cognitive processes cause emotional disorders. He also wants to understand neurological mechanisms and use computational modeling to predict psychopathology.















Collaborators


Within CNIR

  • Prof. Seok-Jun Hong: Computational models of intelligence
  • Prof. Seng Bum Michael Yoo: State-space and sub-space modeling of neural data
  • Prof. Seong-Gi Kim and Dr. Jeongyun Lee: cross-species of pain neuroimaging
  • Prof. Won Mok Shim: various projects, including Korean Human Connectome Project, neural encoding models of personal stories, and a study of interactions between vision and pain, and intrinsic value
  • Dr. Dongho Kim: analgesic effects of paying attention to painful stimuli
  • Dr. Yubu Lee: sequential effects of pain
  • Dr. Eunha Baeg: Nonhuman primate fMRI
  • and more

  • International

  • Tor Wager et al. (My PhD advisor, University of Colorado Boulder, CAN lab): Various projects
  • Liz Losin (University of Miami, SCN lab): Social expression of pain
  • Alex Shackman (University of Maryland, Shackman lab): Cognitive control, negative emotion, and pain in aMCC
  • Jessica Andrews-Hanna (University of Arizona, NET lab): Free-association semantic task and spontaneous thought
  • Emily Finn (Dartmouth College, FINN lab): Individual variability in spontaneous thought
  • and more




  • We’re hiring! (for more imforation, please see here)