MBCT Graduate Alumni

Ilana got her BA in Neuroscience & Behavior from Barnard College where she was first introduced to neuroscience research in the lab of Dr. Stephen Rayport while studying therapeutic targets of schizophrenia. For her undergraduate thesis work she followed a newfound passion for neuroethology all the way to South Africa alongside Dr. Steffen Foerster to research stress and social behavior in chacma baboons. After graduating, she pursued a curiosity for the underlying molecular mechanisms of the brain to the lab of Dr.

Olamide Abiose is a graduate student in the Neurosciences PhD program. She studies under Dr. Elizabeth Mormino and is particularly interested in the effects of chronic stress in the brain, particularly in the context of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). She uses magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and cerebrospinal fluid data to analyze the relationship between stress hormones and AD pathology, brain morphology,  and large-scale functional network topology. She received her bachelor's degree in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology from Washington University in St.

Linnie Jiang graduated from Columbia University in 2019 with a dual BA in Computer
Science and Neuroscience & Behavior. She was an undergraduate Science Research Fellow in
the labs of Richard Axel and Larry Abbott, studying expectation in Drosophila olfactory learning.
Now at Stanford she has joined the labs of Lisa Giocomo and Surya Ganguli and is interested in
studying cognitive representations of uncertainty in the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit.

Siddharth is a PhD student in Materials Science, advised by Nick Melosh and Mark Brongersma. He is interested in developing methods for high bandwidth neural recording. He earned a B.Eng/M.Eng from UNSW (Sydney) in 2017 working with John Daniels and Nigel Lovell.

Jonathan is an Electrical Engineering PhD student, advised by Professor Craig Levin of the Molecular Imaging Instrumentation Lab (MIIL).

His research is focused on improving positron emission tomography (PET) imaging performance.

I started my PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford in 2020. Before that, I received a BS in automation from Tsinghua University in 2017 and an MS in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 specialized in machine learning and computer vision. My research interest is applying machine learning methods on neuroimage analysis, especially on modeling the progression of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s Disease.

I received my BS in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2018. I am currently advised by Bianxiao Cui in the Chemistry Department at Stanford. My research focuses on a label-free, optical approach for recording electrical signals in networks of neurons using an electrochromic material. In my free time, I enjoy rock climbing, playing tennis, and baking.

"Poisoned" by books written by Francis Crick, Eric Kandel and David Marr, Yang has genuine passion in the neurobiological correlates of consciousness, or, to put it more reasonably, cognitive function like memory, emotion, social bonds. Trained as a traditional biology experimentalist, he has the ambition to bridge experiment and theory, to develop (ultimately) the model/theory that truly explains how brain works. When not doing science, he might be playing with his cat, practicing the violin, trying/cooking delicious food, or reading Haruki Murakami.

Yuxi received a BS in Biological Sciences from Tsinghua University in 2018. She is currently a PhD student in the Bioengineering Graduate Program at Stanford and advised by Mark Schnitzer. She is interested in developing and applying image-based transcriptomics tools to study long-term memory and pain processing in neuronal ensembles, and, furthermore, to integrate data over different modalities, for example calcium imaging.

Fatih received his BS degree in Physics and in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey, in 2018, and his MSc degree in Physics from University of Waterloo. During his MSc degree, he completed Perimeter Scholars International program aimed at theoretical physicists. As of Fall 2019, he is a PhD student at the Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University.