Congratulations Dr. Alexis Topete!

Congratulations to Alexis (Lexie) Topete on successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis, titled
"Ovarian Hormones and their influence on Spatial Learning and Navigation"!

Lexie earned her B.A. in Psychology at the University of Utah and worked at Qualtrics for two
years, before joining our Ph.D. program in 2020. At UCSB she has conducted research on
several topics in Spatial Cognition, leading important novel studies of the influence of GPS
navigation device use on navigation abilities, and of how the ways we measure navigation
abilities (by different outcome measures, and in different types of environments) affect the
conclusions we draw about these abilities.

For her dissertation studies, Lexie turned to the question of how ovarian hormones affect spatial
learning and navigation and impressively received an NIH F99/K fellowship to fund her
dissertation and postdoctoral research. Her dissertation included studies of navigation in young
women at different phases of the menstrual cycle and a comparison of healthy young women
with patients undergoing hormone suppression as a treatment for endometriosis. Whereas most
studies of the effects of ovarian hormones on spatial cognition to date have focused on mental
rotation, Lexie conducted one of the first studies that compared navigation abilities of young
women at two different phases of their menstrual cycle, and the first study of its kind conducted
in immersive ambulatory virtual environments. This research showed that young women were
better at survey knowledge acquisition, but not subsequent wayfinding, at ovulation (when
estradiol is high) than during menses (when estradiol is low), consistent with animal studies, but
showing the opposite pattern to what is typical for mental rotation.

Lexie has been a generous collaborator with other lab members, an outstanding mentor of
undergraduate students, notably as co-chair of Access Grads, and an exemplary department
citizen. She is graduating with five publications and three more papers in preparation or revision.
This summer, Lexie is moving to the University of California, Irvine for a postdoc with Liz
Chrastil. It has been a delight to have Lexie in the lab, and we are glad that we will be continuing
to collaborate with her in her postdoctoral work.

Congratulations Dr. Topete!