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Menton Deweese, Ph.D.

About the SSMV

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Director

Educational Background

University of Florida
Department of Psychology

On Teaching

My enthusiasm for teaching stems from an exceptional group of mentors, from whom I learned to think critically, communicate clearly, and seek connections between diverse ideas, disciplines, and communities. These skills and values have served as the foundation of my research career and have shaped my teaching philosophy. As an Instructor, I strive to create a collaborative classroom in which conceptual knowledge, experiential learning, and active inquiry come together to facilitate student success. I am a proponent of learning by doing, which provides a connection for the material discussed in the classroom to a tangible, applied, or feedback-driven outcome, and place considerable emphasis on teaching through demonstrations, discussing clinical case studies, and reviewing cutting-edge research relating to classroom topics. I have 15+ years of experience teaching at the professional, undergraduate, and high school levels, and am most passionate about preparing the next generation of STEM leaders through our work at the SSMV.

Research

I am a cognitive and behavioral neuroscientist who uses neuroimaging (EEG, fMRI) to study the neural mechanisms underlying compulsive cue-induced behaviors, such as nicotine addiction and obesity. My research is focused around a central theme of emotional stimulus processing, using both psychophysiological and behavioral measures to assess motivational and attentional processes in humans. I am interested in how salient cues in the environment capture attention and influence behavior, and have extended this work to populations whose behavior is particularly sensitive to environmental cues, including smokers and individuals with obesity. I expect that a better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying nicotine dependence and obesity will lead to more effective smoking cessation treatments and weight-control interventions, inform regulatory policy and treatment practice, and reduce the substantial economic and health consequences associated with smoking and obesity. 

In partnership with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, I run a small psychophysiology research lab to facilitate SSMV student learning and exposure to electroencephalography (EEG) and behavioral research.

Grant Funding

  • Students Are Scientists: An inquiry-based curriculum on technology’s impact on neurocognitive mechanisms of attention and memory. Dana Foundation, 2026-2027. Role: Co-Principal Investigator.
  • Unearthing Nashville: Digging Deeper and Preserving the Past. Community Engagement Collaboration Fund, Vanderbilt’s Division of Government and Community Relations, 2024 – 2025. Role: Principal Investigator.
  • Vanderbilt AUD Research and Education Center (VAREC), P60 RFA-AA-21-006, NIAAA, PI: Erin Calipari, 3/24/2024-10/31-2028. Role: Co-Investigator, Dissemination Core.
  • Using Accelerometers and Video Analysis to Study Sport-Related Concussions in Adolescent Athletes, 2020 Nashville Predators Foundation Grant, 8/1/2021 – 2/26/2022. Role: Principal Investigator.

Publications

  • Burriss, S. K., B. E. Smith, H. H. Ziegler, A. Villanueva, M.M. Deweese, and A. Eeds (2026). “Young Scholar[s] on the Beat”: Multimodal Composition as a Form of Critical AI Literacy Pedagogy.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 70, no. 2: e70064. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.70064.
  • Versace F, Green CE, Cui Y, Robinson JD, Deweese M.M., Minnix JA, Kypriotakis, G, Kim, S, Karam-Hage, M, and Cinciripini, PM (2026). Personalizing smoking cessation pharmacotherapy using neuroaffective reactivity profiles: A randomized controlled trial. Addiction. 2026;121(7):1888–1898. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.70354 
  • Stein, G., Jean, D., Kittani, S., Deweese, M.M., & Lédeczi, Á. (2025). A Novice-Friendly and Accessible Networked Educational Robotics Simulation Platform. Education Sciences, 15(2), 198. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15020198
  • Deweese, M.M., Roof, E., and Key, A.P. (2023). Food cue reward salience does not explain hyperphagia in adolescents with Prader-Willi syndrome, Developmental Neuropsychology, 48:7, 335-346, https://doi.org/10.1080/87565641.2023.2276950
  • Versace, F., Sambuco, N., Deweese, M.M., and Cinciripini, P.M. (2022). Electrophysiological normative responses to emotional, neutral, and cigarette-related images. Psychophysiology 60.3 (2023): e14196, https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14196
  • Grover, S., Oster, J., Ledeczi, A., Broll, B., & Deweese, M. M. (2022). Climate Science, Data Science and Distributed Computing to Build Teen Students' Positive Perceptions of CS. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (pp. 1101-1101).
  • Deweese, M.M., Versace, F., Kypriotakis, G., Dirba, D., Daniel, C. R., & Schembre, S. M. (2021). Satiety does not affect neuroaffective electrophysiological responses to food-related or emotional visual cues. Behavioral Neuroscience, 135(4), 571–580. https://doi.org/10.1037/bne0000467
  • Frank, D.W., Cinciripini, P.M., Deweese, M.M., Karam-Hage, M., Kypriotakis, G., Lerman, C., Robinson, J.D., Tyndale, R.F., Vidrine, D.J. and Versace, F., 2019. Toward Precision Medicine for Smoking Cessation: Developing a Neuroimaging-Based Classification Algorithm to Identify Smokers at Higher Risk for Relapse. Nicotine & Tobacco Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/ntz211
  • Versace, F., Frank, D. W., Stevens, E. M., Deweese, M. M., Guindani, M., & Schembre, S. M. (2019). The reality of “food porn”: Larger brain responses to food‐related cues than to erotic images predict cue‐induced eating. Psychophysiology, 56(4), e13309. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13309
  • Stevens, E.M., Frank, D., Codispoti, M., Kypriotakis, G., Cinciripini, P.M., Claiborne, K., Deweese, M.M., Engelmann, J.M., Green, C.E., Karam-Hage, M., Minnix, J.A., Ng, J., Robinson, J.D., Tyndale, R.F., Vidrine, D.J., and Versace, F. (2019). The late positive potentials evoked by cigarette-related and emotional images show no gender differences in smokers. Scientific reports, 9(1), pp.1-8.
  • Versace, F., Stevens, E. M., Robinson, J. D., Cui, Y., Deweese, M. M., Engelmann, J. M., Green, C. E., Karam-Hage, M, Lam, C. Y., Minnix, J. A., Wetter, D.W., and Cinciripini, P. M. (2019). Brain Responses to Cigarette-Related and Emotional Images in Smokers During Smoking Cessation: No Effect of Varenicline or Bupropion on the Late Positive Potential. Nicotine and Tobacco Research, 21(2), 234-240. https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/ntx264
  • Deweese, M.M., Codispoti, M., Robinson, J.D., Cinciripini, P.M., and Versace, F. (2018). Cigarette cues capture attention of smokers and never-smokers, but for different reasons. Drug and Alcohol Dependence. 185:50-57. doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2017.12.010.
  • Versace, F., Engelmann, J.M., Deweese, M.M., Robinson, J.D., Green, C.E., Lam, C.Y., Minnix, J.A., Karam-Hage M.A., Wetter, D.W., Schembre, S.M., and Cinciripini, P.M. (2017). Beyond cue reactivity: Non-drug-related motivationally relevant stimuli are necessary to understanding reactivity to drug-related cues. Nicotine and Tobacco Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/ntx002
  • Deweese, M.M., Müller, M.M., and Keil, A. (2016). Extent and Time Course of Competition in Visual Cortex between Emotionally Arousing Distractors and a Concurrent Task. European Journal of Neuroscience. doi: 10.1111/ejn.13180.
  • Deweese, M.M., Robinson, J.D., Cinciripini, P.M., and Versace, F. (2016). Conditioned cortical reactivity to cues predicting cigarette-related or pleasant images. International Journal of Psychophysiology. 101:59-68. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2016.01.007.
  • Deweese, M.M., Claiborne, K.N., Ng, J., Dirba, D.D., Stewart, H.L., Schembre, S.M., and Versace, F. (2015) Dispensing apparatus for use in a cued food delivery task. MethodsX. doi:10.1016/j.mex.2015.11.002
  • Simon, E., Oren, N., Sharon, H., Kirschner , A., Goldway, N., Okon-Singer, H., Tauman, R., Deweese, M.M., Keil, A.,  and Hendler, T. (2015). Losing neutrality: the neural basis of impaired emotional control without sleep. Journal of Neuroscience, 35(38):13194-13205; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1314-15.2015
  • McGinnis Deweese, M., Bradley, M.M., Lang, P.J., Andersen, S.K., Müller, M.M., & Keil, A. (2014). Snake fearfulness is associated with sustained competitive biases to visual snake features: Hypervigilance without avoidance. Psychiatry Research. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2014.05.042.
  • Liu, Y., Huang, H., McGinnis Deweese, E.M., Keil, A., & Ding, M. (2012). Neural substrate of the late positive potential in emotional processing. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(42):14563-72. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3109-12.2012.
  • Keil A., Costa V., Smith J.C., Sabatinelli D., McGinnis E.M., Bradley M.M., Lang P.J. (2011). Tagging Cortical Networks in Emotion: A Topographical Analysis, Human Brain Mapping. doi: 10.1002/hbm.21413.
  • McGinnis E.M. & Keil A. (2011). Selective Processing of Multiple Features in the Human Brain: Effects of Feature Type and Salience. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16824. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016824.

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