Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows Alumni

Kathryn is an MD-PhD student in Stanford's Neurosciences Interdisciplinary Program. She is fascinated by Schwann cells, which are glial cells that sort axons by size and selectively myelinate large-caliber axons during peripheral nervous system development. Kathryn is currently working with Dr. Brad Zuchero and Dr. Wah Chiu to uncover what mechanisms Schwann cells use to execute the dynamic movements necessary to sort and myelinate axons. Prior to Stanford, Kathryn studied Biology at Swarthmore College and conducted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis research in the laboratories of Dr.

Born in Nanjing, China, Yixiu Zhao is a PhD student in the Applied Physics department working in the Linderman Lab on computational neuroscience and machine learning with Dr. Scott Linderman. Yixiu has a wide variety of research interests, including building structured models for statistical inference, making neuroscientific inquiries with machine learning, and better understanding the high-level principles of human and artificial intelligence. His current project involves combining Bayesian inference and deep neural networks for behavioral studies of mice.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has become a global public health challenge. If undetected, the brain damage from TBI can accumulate, calling for better TBI modeling and warning systems. TBI modeling involves three stages: measurement of head impact kinematics, brain deformation, and injuries. In this project, I will leverage machine learning and head impact data to optimize the TBI computational modeling: the measurement precision of head kinematics will be improved and the fast, accurate, and generalizable brain deformation modeling will be done with deep learning.