Jon Hakun

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist by training and direct a program of research incorporating digital health tools, including smartphone-based cognitive tests, ecological momentary assessment, wearable activity monitors, and brain imaging, to observe cognition and behavior as they unfold in everyday settings, to intervene with remote, adaptive digital health programs, and to experiment by testing the mechanisms that drive self-regulatory control and behavior change. We call our lab the Cognitive and Mobile Phenotyping (“CAMP”) Neurolab. A central aim of our work addresses how cognitive executive control changes with age and shapes our capacity to regulate our thoughts, emotions, and behavior in daily life.

Our three most active lines of research include:

1. Self-Regulation and Executive Control. How moment-to-moment and age-related changes in executive control affect self-regulation, self-monitoring, and adherence to health-promoting behaviors such as everyday physical activity.
2. Modernizing Neuroepidemiology. Developing sensitive, scalable mobile tools and research infrastructure that detect early changes in cognitive health and link dementia risk and protective factors to cognitive change from midlife onward.
3. Digital Health Transformation of Clinical Care. Working with clinical partners to bring remote monitoring of cognition and patient-reported outcomes into care for patients at risk of poor cognitive outcomes, including people recovering from concussion and cancer patients.

The CAMP Neurolab is funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging (NIH/NIA). Current support includes an R61/R33 award testing a smartwatch-delivered, adaptive intervention to promote adherence to everyday light-intensity physical activity for dementia prevention and a U19 cooperative agreement award to advance mobile monitoring of cognitive change for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. The lab is also a member of the NIH Open Measurement Network Initiative (U24) and the UM Roybal Center for promoting adherence to behavior change and enhancing cognitive function (P30).

Before joining UW–Madison, I was on the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University, most recently as Associate Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine. Prospective graduate students and potential collaborators interested in digital health, cognitive aging, and physical activity behavior change are encouraged to reach out.

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellowship, Neurocognitive Aging, University of Kentucky, 2015
• PhD, Psychology (Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience), Michigan State University, 2013
• MA, Psychology (Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience), Michigan State University, 2011
• MSW, Social Work, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2004
• BA, Psychology, Rowan University, 2002

Select Publications

• Durfee, K. J., Elbin, R. J., Womble, M. N., Jennings, S., Dollar, C. M., Schatz, P., Elbich, D. B., & Hakun, J. G. (2026). Concussion in the wild: Clinical utility of ambulatory assessment of symptoms and everyday exposures in adolescents and adults with concussion. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 41(3).
• Hakun, J. G., Elbich, D. B., Alwerdt, J. N., Tate, A. M., Coyl, J. L., Kanski, B. M., & Qiu, T. (2025). The Physical Activity, Imaging, and Ambulatory Testing (PHIAT) Project: Protocol for a high-frequency ambulatory assessment study. JMIR Research Protocols, 14, e66290.
• Hakun, J. G., Benson, L., Qiu, T., Elbich, D. B., Katz, M., Shaw, P. A., Sliwinski, M. J., & Mossavar-Rahmani, Y. (2025). Cognitive health benefits of everyday physical activity in a diverse sample of middle-aged adults. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 59(1), kaae059.
• Yang, C.-H., Lee, J., Prine, H., Coffman, D., Wei, J., Hedeker, D., & Hakun, J. G. (2025). Daily movement activities are associated with within-person instability of cognitive function in older adults: Evidence from an ambulatory assessment study. Innovation in Aging, 9, igaf059.
• Brearly, T. W., Elbich, D. B., Dhinojwala, M., & Hakun, J. G. (2025). Contextualized cognition: Clarifying associations between remote unsupervised performance and clinically relevant contextual factors. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 1–26.
• Oravecz, Z., Vandekerckhove, J., Hakun, J. G., Kim, S. H., Katz, M. J., Wang, C., Lipton, R. B., Derby, C. A., Roque, N. A., & Sliwinski, M. J. (2025). Computational phenotyping of cognitive decline with retest learning. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 80(7), gbaf030.
• Kim, S. H., Hakun, J. G., Li, Y., Harrington, K. D., Elbich, D. B., Sliwinski, M. J., Vandekerckhove, J., & Oravecz, Z. (2025). Optimizing the Color Shapes Task for ambulatory assessment and drift diffusion modeling: A factorial experiment. JMIR Formative Research, 9, e66300.
• Mossavar-Rahmani, Y., Hyun, N., Hakun, J. G., Katz, M. J., Pavlovic, J. M., Zetterberg, H., Wang, Z., Yang, J. B., Wylie-Rosett, J., Hebert, J. R., Sliwinski, M. J., & Shaw, P. A. (2025). The effects of the Multicultural Healthy Diet on cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease risk: A phase II randomized controlled trial in middle-aged adults. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 122(1), 48–59.