Samuel E. Cooper, Ph.D.

Samuel E. Cooper, Ph.D., is a clinical psychological scientist and cognitive neuroscientist within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Dell Medical School. He received his B.A. from Hunter College, City University of New York, and his doctoral degree in clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where he trained in experimental psychopathology and biological systems of fear and anxiety. He completed his predoctoral clinical internship at the VA Maryland Healthcare System, as part of the trauma recovery clinic at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs hospital.

Cooper completed his postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging at Dell Med, where he trained in using computational approaches to decoding multivariate functional MRI data in emotional learning and memory tasks. His research seeks to better understand maladaptive threat learning and memory mechanisms in relation to empirical trauma and anxiety dimensions. Current research foci include mapping the neurobehavioral mechanisms that underlie how fear directly and indirectly generalizes and contributes to maladaptive behaviors (e.g., avoidance) and then better understanding how we can treat these problems with augmentations to exposure protocols; characterizing higher-order forms of fear and safety learning in anxiety-related psychopathology, particularly PTSD and OCD; research into the quantitative structures of trauma, obsessive-compulsive, and broader internalizing psychopathology in the service of systematically linking threat mechanisms with empirical dimensions; and combining lab-based neural data with ecological momentary assessment techniques to better align mechanistic work with everyday experiences of anxiety and trauma symptoms.

Cooper is also committed to advancing improved quantitative methods across disciplines and bridging quantitative, clinical, and neural sciences effectively to strengthen the applicability, generalizability, and replicability of research findings. His clinical interests include exposure- and acceptance-based therapies for trauma and anxiety, as well as comprehensive psychodiagnostic and personality assessment.