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Horizon Seminar: Senior Instructors
Horizon Seminar simulates a university-level research class, with classes of 3-6 students taught by a professor or lecturer with decades of teaching experience. Students develop individualized research projects of their own choosing and design.
Edoardo Gallo
Associate Professor, the University of Cambridge
Edoardo Gallo is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge and an Official Fellow in Economics at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is also an Associate Member at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a Fellow at the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance. His research sits at the intersection of the economics of networks, experimental economics, and behavioral economics. The fundamental question it investigates is how the structure of social networks causally affects individual behavior and economic outcomes in a wide range of contexts. Prior to coming to Cambridge, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church (Oxford) and completed his A.B. in Physics and Mathematics at Harvard University. He has taught political economy, behavioral economics, networks, economic theory, behavioral finance, and mathematics at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Harvard University. Gallo earned his D.Phil. (PhD) in Economics from the University of Oxford.
David Rezvani
Research Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College
David Rezvani has previously taught at Harvard University, MIT, Oxford University, and Boston University. He is also the author of Surpassing the Sovereign State: The Wealth, Self-Rule, and Security Advantages of Partially Independent Territories (Oxford University Press, 2014). Rezvani’s research interests include political integration, Asian politics, and US foreign policy. His work has appeared in the Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Ethnopolitics, and the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. He has held research fellowships at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and has won research grants from Harvard University, Oxford University, Trinity College, the Smith Richardson Foundation, Boston College, and Hong Kong University. As a speaker of English, Mandarin Chinese, and Persian, he has conducted fieldwork in Europe, China, and the Middle East. He earned his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.
Vladimir Chernov
Professor, Dartmouth College
Vladimir Chernov has worked at the ETH Zurich, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn and Zurich University. Currently he is a Full Tenured professor at Dartmouth College, where he has taught since 2001. He is an author of more than 30 research papers in the Mathematics and Mathematical Physics research journals. His works appeared in Geometry and Topology, Topology, Geometric and Functional Analysis, Algebraic and Geometric Topology, Communications in Contemporary Mathematics, Communications in Mathematical Physics, Geometry and Physics and Journal of Mathematical Physics. He has had collaboration grants from the Simons Foundation. He has earned his two PhDs from the Uppsala University Sweden and UC Riverside, USA.
James Truncer
Lecturer, Harvard University Extension School, Former Lecturer at Stanford University
James Truncer has taught environmental engineering and environmental systems collapse courses at Harvard since 2012. Prior to teaching at Harvard, he was a lecturer at Stanford University for 9 years, where he taught similar courses. Truncer has also conducted archaeological research in North America and India and published his findings in academic journals, edited volumes, and monographs. His work has led to an interest in sustainability issues with regard to changing agricultural production, urbanization, resource use, and systems collapse. He earned his Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of Washington.
Guillermo Goldsztein
Professor, Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Professor Goldsztein is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1992 he received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Buenos Aires and in 1997 a PhD in mathematics from MIT. During the three following years (1997-2000), he was a postdoctoral scholar and lecturer in applied mathematics at CalTech. Since 2000, he has been a faculty member of the School of Mathematics of Georgia Tech, where he is now a full professor. Professor Goldsztein enjoys applying mathematics that can be used in other other fields of science such as computational biology, machine learning, and the intersection between math and physics. Machine learning is among his areas of expertise.
Maria Konte
Research Scientist , Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Maria Konte is a Research Scientist at the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and affiliated with its Institute for Information Security & Privacy. Her research is in the intersection of network security, network traffic analytics and machine learning. Her research work focuses on gaining insight from measurements, to design and build tools and methodologies, to improve the security of networks. Her work on network reputation as a measure to defend against cybercriminal infrastructures, appeared at ACM SIGCOMM15, and NANOG62 Research Track. At Georgia Tech, she teaches intermediate and advanced level courses in Computer Networking. She received the Passive and Active Measurement Conference Best Paper Award 2009 for her work on hosting infrastructures of malicious DNS domains. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2015. She holds a Master's in Systems Engineering from Boston University, and a Diploma in Eng. from the Industrial Engineering and Management Dept. at Technical University of Crete, Greece. She has worked at Damballa and Verisign Labs prior to entering academia.
Bridget Callaghan
Assistant Professor, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Dr. Bridget Callaghan is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is the director of the Brain and Body Lab (BABLab), which opened in 2019. Before starting at UCLA, Bridget was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University in New York, and completed her doctorate in Psychology and her training as a clinical psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Her work examines interactions between mental and physical health across development. Bridget has experience working with animal models of early adversity, as well as in behavioral, fMRI, and biological research within human populations. Her work at the BaBLab examines how different early life experiences influence interactions between physical and mental health across the lifespan, with the goal of using this research to create better mental and physical health treatments across development, informed by psychological functioning, trauma history, and central and peripheral biology.Horizon Labs
Horizon Labs focuses on more specialized topics and is one-on-one and thus more open-ended. Horizon Labs allows students to get individualized mentorship from instructors who are on the front lines of PhD-level research, often who are in the process of completing their own PhD or postdoctoral research. These instructors are more intimately acquainted with the latest studies, the most relevant data sets, and the most interesting perspectives being introduced in their respective fields. This list includes many of our mentors, but it is not a complete list as we honor requests by mentors to not be listed publicly for personal privacy purposes. If you would like to see the full list of mentors for a particular subject, please reach out to fill out this form with the request for additional information.
Dr. Sam Haddad
MS, PhD, University of Cambridge; Recently Completed Post-Doc at Cambridge
Sam earned both his Masters in Advanced Chemical Engineering and PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge. He then completed a year of post-doctoral research at the same institution. He is currently studying Medicine. Prior to beginning his graduate work, Sam graduated with high distinction from the American University of Beirut. Broadly, his research investigates the design and clinical application of nanoparticle-based drug delivery systems for cancer therapy. Sam is particularly interested in targeting these nanoparticles to deliver their drug payload to specific organelles within tumour cells (e.g. mitochondria), as well as developing treatment solutions for hard-to-reach and hard-to-treat cancers such as those of the brain, lungs, and pancreas.
Patrick Emedom-Nnamdi
PhD Researcher at Harvard University
Patrick Emedom-Nnamdi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he focuses on smartphone based digital phenotyping and mobile health. Specifically, he develops statistical and quantitative methods for studying social, behavioral, and cognitive phenotypes. His current research aims at creating prediction models for determining time to recovery in surgical patients.
Dr. Eshaan R. B.
PhD from the University of Chicago
Eshaan R. B. has a PhD in neurobiology from the University of Chicago, where he studied the cellular and genetic regulation of transcription factors in neurons. Using a wide variety of experimental techniques, including live-cell neuronal imaging coupled with glutamate uncaging, next-generation sequencing, induced pluripotent stem cell culture, and CRSPR-mediated gene editing, he sought to characterize the gene regulatory function and activity-dependent translocation of novel transcription factors in the brain, as well as how these characteristics could contribute to the etiology of complex mental illnesses such autism spectrum disorder, major depressive disorder, or bipolar disorder. In undergrad, he earned Bachelor of Science degrees in both chemistry and neuroscience at the University of Minnesota, where he also conducted extensive research on the mechanisms of chronic pain as well as characterizing a novel Alzheimer’s disease mouse model.
Dr. César Cabezas
Preceptor at Columbia University
César Cabezas Gamarra is Preceptor at Columbia University's Center for the Core Curriculum and teaches the renowned 'Contemporary Civilization' course at Columbia. He holds a PhD from the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. The core of Cabezas Gamarra's research lies at the intersection of philosophy of race, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of social science. In addition, he is interested in ethics, social epistemology and feminist philosophy. He is currently finishing his dissertation on structural racism and durable racial inequality.
Dr. Nikzad F.
PhD Cambridge University/PhD in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology
Nikzad Falahati earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge (2020). His research explored filtration processes by investigating the formation of filter cakes and evaluating the effects of particle properties on cake structures. The work required a range of scientific techniques including lab filtration experiments, X-ray imaging to visualize cake structures, and computational simulations of particle systems. Throughout his Ph.D., Nikzad mentored penultimate year undergraduate students on particle processing and marked undergraduate lab reports. Before his Ph.D., Nikzad obtained an MEng in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London (2016). In his final year research project, he investigated the effects of preparation parameters on the properties of membranes used for wastewater treatment. Alongside his research, Nikzad organized social events for his postgraduate community as part of the college committee, and he is a keen hiker.
Dr. Tom M.
Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge
Tom M. is a research fellow at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. The project was in collaboration with Infineum UK Ltd. to explore the mechanism of friction reduction and anti-wear caused by small molecular additives in engine oil formulations. Tom earned his PhD in Physical Chemistry in 2018 at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His PhD research investigated the chemical processing of atomically thin carbon nanomaterials in water for the purposes of water purification and oil recovery. In addition, he explored the self-assembly of surfactant molecules that form complex fluids using a technique called neutron scattering. In his spare time, Tom enjoys travelling, playing piano and basketball.
Dr. Parsa A.
Research Associate, Statistical Genetics, The University of Cambridge
Dr. Parsa A. is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge working in Statistical Genetics. He received his PhD from Downing College at the University of Cambridge in Statistical Genetics. Parsa has both academic and commercial experience in the application of statistical analysis to generate commercial and scientific value. In the past Parsa has worked for UCB Biopharma to develop Machine Learning algorithms predicting the side effects of drug compounds, and has worked as a consultant role with organisations based in Beijing, New York and Los Angeles providing training and advice in the implementation of statistical models. Parsa co-founded an online technology platform allowing the open source online generation of content by users which was sold in 2013. Parsa contributes to Downing Enterprise with his strong links to the entrepreneurial community in Cambridge including as a former president of the Cambridge Data Society, connection to the Judge Business School via the Accelerate programme, and previous role as Information Officer of the Cambridge Technology and Enterprise Society.
Alasdair Craig
PhD Researcher at the University of Oxford; Commissioning Editor, Hurst Publishers
Alasdair Craig graduated with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford in 2022. His research was at the intersection of epistemology, the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. While at Oxford he taught undergraduate courses in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of cognitive science, logic and metaphysics, as well as courses in essay-writing and study skills. Since 2023, Dr Craig has been working in academic publishing while continuing to teach courses in philosophy to undergraduates.
Marta Madureira
PhD Researcher at the University of Oxford – Visiting PhD from University of Porto
Marta is a PhD student in Richard Wade-Martins’ lab at the University of Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics. Her research focuses on investigating the molecular neurobiology of Parkinson’s Disease. More specifically this includes investigating autophagy, the break down and recycling of proteins and other cellular components, and how this process is impaired in neurons. The aim of her project is to better understand this neurodegenerative disease and to ultimately develop new drug targets. Before starting her PhD, she was a research technician in the Hens Lab at the University of Oxford, looking at expression of synthetic promoters in Drosophila Melanogaster. Prior to this position, she was also involved in processing and genotyping samples as an intern at a Molecular Genetics lab at the University of Lisbon, Portugal.
David Brossault
PhD Researcher at the University of Cambridge
David Brossault is a PhD researcher at the department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. His research, based on material science, explores the design and optimisation of silica based composite materials for use in both environmental (e.g. water treatment) and biological (e.g. imaging and drug delivery) applications. In his department, David is also involved in teaching activities giving poster design sessions, marking undergraduate student lab reports as well as mentoring master student lab projects. Before his PhD, David obtained his BSc in Chemistry (2013) and a dual MSc in General and Formulation Chemistry (2017). He has developed sound research skills, adaptability and scientific interest through 2 years working in various industrial R&D departments, including Sanofi (United-Kingdom), Capsugel (France), BASF (Germany) and UCB Pharma (Belgium). Alongside his academic life, David is involved in his college life, working as outreach academic speaker, postgraduate committee member as well as college squash captain.
Merrick S.
PhD Candidate at Harvard University
Merrick is a Chemical Biology PhD student at Harvard, currently studying the regulatory processes involved in the development of human eggs and sperm with the eventual goal of producing them in vitro from pluripotent stem cells. He is also more broadly interested in the field of synthetic biology, including gene editing and RNA biochemistry. Merrick grew up in Minneapolis, MN and attended the University of Minnesota. While an undergraduate, he conducted research on the hexadehydro-Diels-Alder reaction with Prof. Thomas Hoye, and was a summer student in the lab of Prof. Emily Balskus at Harvard where he studied bacterial choline metabolism. After graduating with dual BScs in chemistry and biochemistry, he studied human germ cell development with Prof. Azim Surani as a Churchill scholar at Cambridge, England, where he obtained his MPhil. Merrick then returned to Harvard, where he is currently an NSF graduate fellow in the lab of Prof. George Church.
Perman J.
PhD Researcher at the University of Cambridge
Perman is a PhD researcher at the department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. His research is focused on utilising Machine Learning algorithms and automated experimental tools to enhance process development in chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Before his PhD studies, Perman completed his undergraduate work at KAIST (Korea) where he studied Chemistry, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Economics (minor). His research at KAIST focused on (1) developing chemical probes (molecules) for early stage detection of Alzheimer’s disease and (2) designing and developing covalent organic polymers (COPs) for CO2 capture and storage. Perman has also worked as a researcher at EPFL (Switzerland) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work at EPFL focused on designing and synthesizing fluorescent molecules for live cell imaging, specifically targeting proteins associated with cancer. At MIT, Perman has worked on developing new methods for analysis and quantification of upgrading crude oil. He has experience in teaching, organising events, leading projects, and working with diverse set of teams on different projects across the globe.
Dr. Brian E.
PhD in Philosophy and Psychology from Yale University
Brian is a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Psychology from Yale University. He also did a master’s degree in psychology from the University Oxford, and a second master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. Also serving as Associate Director of the Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy and Research Fellow in the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, he does work primarily in moral psychology, experimental philosophy, and bioethics among other areas. With Professor Julian Savluescu, he is the author of Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships (Stanford University Press, 2020). Brian is also a professional actor and singer. His academic webpage is here; his theater reel is here.
Jared Weaver
PhD Candidate and Research Associate at Stanford University
Jared Weaver is a PhD candidate in Biophysical Chemistry at Stanford. He studies energy capture in photosynthetic proteins through use of genetically encoded non-natural amino acids which are not normally present in biology. In his studies, he employs ultrafast methods among other biophysical tools. Jared is also actively involved in developing new tools to better understand biology in general. His research seeks to gain inspiration for current challenges and questions in chemistry through use and an understanding of biological systems. He holds a BS from Southern Utah University and is in the final year(s) of his program at Stanford.
Nadia Nasreddin
PhD Researcher at the University of Oxford
Nadia is a PhD candidate at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, looking into the link between inflammation and tumorigenesis. She specifically focuses on the molecular characterization of colitis-associated colorectal cancer, with the aim of elucidating the carcinogenic pathway of this type of colorectal cancer and the ultimate goal of improving patient management and treatment. She undertook her undergraduate studies in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Westminster, London, and she completed a master’s degree in Human Molecular Genetics at Imperial College London, London. She then took up a position as Research Assistant in Colorectal Cancer at the University of Oxford, prior to starting her PhD.
Alex T.
PhD Candidate at Stanford University
Alex is a doctoral candidate in computer science at Stanford University. His primary research interest is in the development of interpretable computational models on biological data, which then subsequently informs scientific discovery. In his work, he improves and exploits the human-interpretability of deep learning models on biological problems. Prior to his studies at Stanford, he earned in B.A.s in biology and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His favorite animals are cats and caterpillars (no relation).
Derek S.
PhD Candidate at University of Cambridge
Derek S is an expert in blockchain, cryptocurrency, and formal verification and a PhD candidate doing research in type theory at the University of Cambridge. He graduated with my MSc in Mathematics and Foundations of Computer Science from the University of Oxford and holds a BSc in Mathematics from Brigham Young University. He is also a Formal Verification Engineer working with Clearmatics. Past positions have included a consultant with Digital Asset in New York, adjunct math faculty at Utah Valley University, and a research mathematician at Pyrofex Corporation. His work has included formal verification of Ethereum smart contracts and blockchain consensus algorithms; designing and implementing safe and live cryptocurrencies; designing the formal semantics of programming languages in the K-Framework; formal verification in the same; research and formal verification for a Pyrofex-developed proof-of-stake consensus algorithm Casanova; formally verifying network specs and Haskell algorithms in, respectively, TLA+ and Agda; and conducting and publishing original research in distributed systems, type theory, and blockchains (see Publications for links).
Ana Queiroz
Research Fellow at Harvard University
Ana Queiroz is biologist with a master's and a PhD in genetics. At Harvard University, she is member of the mammoth de-extinction project that uses gene editing to create cold resistant elephants with ecological functions similar to the extinct animal. She has developed many research skills over more than 10 years of research, being gene editing, conservation and next-generation sequencing the ones she is currently more involved with. Ana has worked in many different areas of science, such as microbiology, immunology, pharmacology, environment, forensics and conservation.Haley Wohlever
PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley
Haley Wohlever is a PhD student in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently studying applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to a variety of problems including oceanic vortex stability, ice stupas, and green desalination. She is interested in context-driven design, interdisciplinary research, and the intersection of food, energy, and water systems.
Angelina W.
PhD Candidate at Princeton University
Angelina is a current PhD student in Computer Science at Princeton University. She is interested in machine learning fairness and algorithmic bias. More broadly, she is also interested in how technology impacts society. She has interned at Google twice. She was a Regents and Chancellors' Scholar at U.C. Berkeley, where she also served as an Academic Officer at Machine Learning @ Berkeley and a course assistant for the Introduction to Machine Learning course.William
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
William is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge working on the design of biosensors utilising a high precision inkjet printer. Working jointly between the Department of Chemical Engineering and Physics he is concerned with the patterning of biomolecules onto optical wafers to create novel sensing strategies. Originally a Physics/Computer science and Marine Engineering graduate, he has worked as an engineer within the Merchant Navy and as a research and development scientist for a Clean Energy Fuel Cell company. In his spare time he enjoys playing classical guitar and walking.
Jiyoung
PhD Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley
Jiyoung is a Clinical Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on utilizing idiographic approaches to identify within- and between-person variability in the formation and maintenance of psychopathology, specifically in the context of internal and external stressors. He is also interested in studying how to best disseminate evidence-based treatments to community health clinics outside of research settings. Through his research, Jiyoung hopes to create accessible, personalized interventions for mood and anxiety disorders. Prior to his PhD research, Jiyoung received his BA in Psychology and BAS in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests in clinical psychology developed at Penn, where he examined how various aspects of CBT for panic disorder predicted treatment outcome. After graduating from Penn, Jiyoung worked as a clinical research coordinator at Stanford Medical School, managing a dissemination and implementation research project.
Micheal D.
PhD Candidate at Stanford University
Micheal is an ancient history PhD candidate at Stanford University. He received his BA in history from the University of California Riverside in 2016 and his MA in history from California State University, Los Angeles in 2018. He is primarily interested in comparative studies of slave systems in the ancient Mediterranean. In particular, he is interested in exploring comparisons to gain a better understanding of how these systems were managed and the various roles of slaves throughout history. His interests also extend to the formation of ethnic identities, expressions of love, gender relations, military and political propaganda, and degrees of autonomy.
Ellen R.
PhD Candidate at University of Cambridge
Ellen is currently a PhD student in psychology at the University of Cambridge. She received her BA in cognitive neuroscience at Occidental College in Los Angeles. At Occidental, her work concerned cross-cultural effects on empathy. Her current doctoral research is in social and developmental psychology, specifically in gender development. Her project investigates how gender is constructed through the interaction of individual psychological and collective sociological processes. As a member of Cambridge’s Gender Development Research Centre, she is interested in the implications that her project can have for understanding some of the social influences on gender development and identity. She has implemented both quantitative and qualitative methods in her doctoral work as well as in multiple unrelated research projects during her time at Cambridge. These projects have included developing a novel scale on conservation research styles, analyzing gendered toy preference among indigenous children in Peru, and evaluating the impact of a local charity.
Dr. Joanna Szypula
Behavioral Scientist (MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge)
Dr. Joanna Szypula defended her PhD in Psychology in 2022 and is now working as a behavioral scientist for a lifestyle and nutrition company. Her PhD investigated how recalling recent meals influenced snacking, and how this effect could be utilized in weight loss intervention. She has also previously worked with Professor David Shanks on a project investigating how the selection of a misleading photograph can affect subsequent identification accuracy. Joanna specializes in human memory, cognition, social psychology, and behavior change. At Horizon, Joanna delivers sessions on human memory and its reliability. Joanna's sessions include reviewing key literature findings, hands-on workshops designed to help students appreciate the multifaceted nature of scientific research, and an overview of statistics. She guides students through the sessions step-by-step, teaching them to conduct valid experiments and to interpret data by using real-life examples and demonstrations.
Hochan "Sonny"
PhD Candidate at Princeton University
Hochan "Sonny" is a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Princeton University, where he is undertaking the Program in Political Philosophy. He holds a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford as well as a BA in Philosophy and in Political Science from Brown University.
Niki G.
PhD Candidate at Columbia University
Niki is a PhD candidate in Emily Mace’s lab at Columbia University in New York City. Niki received her Bachelor’s in Biology at the University of Delaware and holds a Masters in Biomaterial Science from New York University as well as a Masters in Nutritional and Metabolic Biology from Columbia University. She previously gained industry experience in several STEM fields including polymer science, biochemistry, and biomaterials science. Her current research is focused on human immunodeficiencies that affect natural killer cells to gain a better understanding of the biology of the immune system. In her work, she utilizes a wide variety of experimental approaches, including analyzing gene expression, microscopy, and flow cytometry. As she works towards her PhD degree, Niki’s ultimate goal is to identify and pursue potential immunotherapies for natural killer cell deficiencies.
Scott E.
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Scott E. is a PhD candidate in chemical engineering at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research focuses on applying magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods to quantify flow and molecular transport in porous systems such as rocks and materials used for heterogeneous catalysis. Prior to beginning his PhD work, Scott completed research internships in both the oil and chemical products industry, where his work included modeling fluid mixing in chemical reactors, and the development of novel non-stick coatings.
Everardo Hegewisch Solloa
PhD Candidate at Columbia University
Evey is a third year cellular, molecular and biomedical sciences PhD Candidate studying human Natural Killer (NK) cell immunobiology and development in the Mace Lab, located at Columbia University Irving Medical Center: College of Physicians and Surgeons. Recently, he received a Master of Arts in cellular, molecular and biomedical sciences as well as multiple NIH diversity grants for my studies on defining the molecular requirements of human NK cell development. Before his studies at Columbia University, he started my scientific career by pursuing a BS in Microbiology and a Master of Science in Biological Sciences from UC San Diego. His thesis work at UC San Diego focused on delineating principals of directed evolution of viruses by using lambda phage as a model. Overall, his goal is to pursue a career as a principal investigator at a research institution where he can focus on studying Host-Pathogen interactions and evolution.
Dr. Rida Assaf
PhD, University of Chicago
Rida holds PhD in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. His main research interests are High Performance Computing and Machine Learning, and their applications in the Bioinformatics domain. He is involved in multiple research projects that include feature extraction, classification, clustering, and other algorithmic techniques applied on cancer and anti-bacterial resistance datasets, among others. He has published papers and chapters mostly related to this field, and to scientific computing in general, applied to high energy physics. He has extensive experience teaching at different universities in different countries. These include the American University of Beirut, Western Michigan University, and the University of Chicago. His experience in the industry has mostly been as internships performed at Google, in its New York and Zurich offices. He has won the Graduate Scholar and Creative Research Award at Western Michigan University, and gained membership to top honor societies in the states.
Andrew "Andy" S.
PhD Candidate at University of Chicago
Andrew is a PhD psychology student in the Integrative Neuroscience program at University of Chicago. He is broadly interested in neural processes of valuation and decision making. He works in a neuroethology lab studying electrophysiological mechanisms of auditory perception and choice behavior in a songbird model. Andrew is especially interested in how female songbirds perceive the temporal features of male song, how this affects song preferences, and whether this relates to music and language processing in humans. Prior to beginning this research, he earned a bachelor's degree in Music with a minor in Philosophy. He then completed post-baccalaureate work in cognitive science. As a research assistant at Oregon Health and Science University, he used diffusion tensor imaging and measures of cognition and temperament to study the association between white matter microstructure and impulsivity in children. Andrew has also worked as a music instructor, English teacher, and biochemistry tutor, and has given many presentations via his public Meetup group, Brain & Cognitive Science Seminar.
Natalya S.
PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Natalya is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. Her research is focused on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying tactile perception. Specifically, she is studying the role of the thalamus in tactile coding. Her interests also include deciphering the neural correlates of perception and restoration of touch and motor control to individuals with nerve damage. Prior to starting her PhD work, Natalya studied the role of attention in vision, and has published several papers on the attentional mechanisms underlying microsaccades and foveal perception.
Karly D.
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Karly is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a PhD researcher in Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Additionally, Karly teaches on undergraduate courses in the Department of Psychology and Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. She received her BA (Hons.) in Psychology from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in Social and Developmental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. Broadly, she is interested in psychological, behavioural, and systems change. Her current research aims to improve gender equity, diversity, and inclusion. She designs and evaluates theory-driven interventions and investigates the cognitive, emotional, and social mechanisms involved in maintaining and – most importantly – reducing the effects of gender biases. Outside of academia, Karly is a hip-hop dancer and choreographer.
Ana Maria Pereira de Souza
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire
Ana Maria is a Psychologist and a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, having just completed her PhD at the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the intersection between clinical and biological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders, with a major focus on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. More specifically, she uses electroencephalographic recordings to address the neurocircuitry of obsessions and compulsions in the brain, combining those measures with behavioral tasks, neuropsychological questionnaires, and clinical interviews. Prior to coming to Cambridge, Ana Maria completed a Psychology Degree and a Masters, whilst seeing patients on her private practice. Ana Maria has experience teaching undergraduate students in Cambridge and abroad, and she aspires to lead a career in academia.
Christa C.
PhD Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles
Christa is a 4th year PhD student in Bioinformatics. She primarily works on big data problems in human genetics. Recently, she has worked on identifying biomarkers for ALS using cell-free DNA methylation data. She also is interested in the application of genetics for personalized medicine, especially for diverse populations. Her most current project involves estimating fine-scale genetic populations in the UCLA biobank in order to identify health disparities that may exist in the Los Angeles community.
Daniel K.
PhD Candidate at Cornell University
Daniel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Cornell University. His research broadly covers the areas of machine learning, algorithmic fairness, and optimization, with a focus on policy evaluation. Prior to his research at Cornell, Daniel completed a BS in Applied Mathematics from Yale University.
Snow Naing
PhD Candidate at the University of California, San Francisco
Snow Naing is a fourth year PhD candidate in Bioinformatics at UCSF. Her research focuses on protein-protein interactions in autism spectrum disorder. Before pursuing her PhD, she earned her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Physics at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Chinenyenwa Mpamaugo
MD MPH, Resident Physician at the University of Washington
Dr. Mpamaugo is a pediatric resident at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital. She received her MD and MPH at the University of Pittsburgh prior to starting residency. Her medical school research focused on clinical outcomes for surgical interventions specifically minimally invasive esophagectomy, while her Masters research focused on social determinants of health as it pertains to assess to quality healthcare and equity across various racial/ethnic groups as well as genders. She continues to have a passion for healthy policy as it pertains to equitable access to healthcare. Prior to medical school she held research positions at the National Institutes of Health and Columbia University studying the visual cortical system in nonhuman primates and the effect of stereotype treat on performance on standardized exams. She has earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Neuroscience from Columbia University in the City of New York.
Kenny Kuhn
PhD Candidate at the University of California, San Diego
Kenny Kuhn is a PhD candidate in Dr. Martin Hetzer’s lab in the Department of Neuroscience at the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences. His work aims to understand how changes to the organization of the genome with age can result in dysregulated gene expression and accelerate the development of Alzheimer’s disease. This work takes advantage recent advances in stem cell biology that permit the production of human cortical neurons directly from skin cells, allowing access to otherwise rare samples. He performed his undergraduate work at the University of Virginia while studying neurotrophin signaling and has held a position as a research assistant at the University of Würzburg in Germany.
Paula Martorell
PhD Researcher at the University Hospital Bonn
Paula Martorell is a PhD candidate working in the Department of Neurodegenerative Disorders at the University Hospital Bonn and the laboratory Neuroinflammation at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) lead by Prof. Dr. Michael Heneka. Her research focuses in investigating the activation of innate immune pathways during neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). More particularly, her project aims to uncover the role of the cGAS-STING immune pathway during AD, and the cross-talk between microglia, astrocytes, and neurons in this pathological context. She performed her bachelor studies in Biotechnology at the National University of Tucumán, Argentina. She then obtained a scholarship to conduct a Master in Neurosciences at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She was introduced to the field of Neuroimmunology during her Master’s thesis at the laboratory of Experimental Therapeutics of Neurodegeneration, at the Brain & Spine Institute (ICM) located at the Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital.
Christina Antoniou
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Christina is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a PhD candidate in Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. She received her BSc in Biomedical Sciences with Honours in Neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh and then did her MPhil in Medical Science at the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil project investigated the role of a prodegenerative protein in models of neuroinflammation. Her current research focuses on understanding molecular mechanisms responsible for axon degeneration with the aim of developing ways to target them in order to halt the progression of neurodegenerative conditions.
Jackie Katzman
PhD Candidate at the John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Jackie Katzman is a current doctoral student and incoming assistant professor (starting Fall ‘23)
at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and John Jay College. Jackie focuses on the
causes of racial disparities in the legal system, with a specific focus on racial disparities in
mistaken identifications. Jackie has had her work funded by the National Science Foundation,
the American Psychology-Law Society, the American Academy of Forensic Psychology, and
CUNY. Her work has been published in journals like Law & Human Behavior, Behavioral Sciences
& the Law, and UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review. Jackie received her BA from Cornell
University with majors in both Psychology and Government.Rui He
PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Rui He is a PhD student in the program of Integrative Neuroscience under the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Rui develops behavioral studies to examine the effects of context associations and olfactory routes (i.e. orthonasal and retronasal) on olfactory learning. She is interested in using electrophysiological recordings in the olfactory system to explore the underlying neural representations of olfactory hedonics.
Benjamin H.
PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Ben H. is a PhD candidate in the Committee on Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. He focuses on how the early visual system adapts to flexibly encode and process information in natural scenes. He facilitates this work using maximum entropy modeling to investigate population level changes in the retina in response to natural scenes.
Mason
PhD Candidate at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech)
Mason is a PhD candidate in computation and neural systems at Caltech. His current work involves making machine vision systems more efficient by leveraging insights from biological vision systems, and asking questions like, "How can a frugal vision system decide if a computation is worth the time and energy required to perform it?". In the past, he worked on answering questions like, "How is object shape represented in the primate visual system?" and "What can we learn about how a fruit fly sees from its connectome (the map of all the cell-to-cell connections in its brain)?". He also helped develop courses in machine vision, neuroscience, and computational imaging. Before coming to Caltech, he studied cognitive neuroscience and computer science at Brown University, and worked in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at Drexel University.
Hannah
PhD Candidate at the City College of New York
Hannah is a Clinical Psychology PhD candidate at the City College of New York. She evaluates and treats children and adult patients with a wide range of symptoms and psychopathology. As part of the research team in the INTERSECT Lab at CCNY, Hannah conducts research on social-emotional development in childhood, the impact of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy interventions, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health outcomes among college age adults. A graduate of Columbia University, she previously worked at the Barnard Cognitive Development Center exploring the development of spatial numerical cognition across the lifespan. In addition, she was the Research Coordinator and an early childhood teacher at the Barnard Toddler Center. In her free time, She loves to run in Central Park, tap dance, test out new recipes, and listen to podcasts.
Lasya Sreepada
PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania
Lasya Sreepada is a Bioengineering PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania under Dr. Christos Davatzikos, in the Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Imaging Lab. She is interested in exploring human neuroscience through interdisciplinary research and clinical practice. Her research leverages artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in medical imaging, clinical & genomic data to elucidate underlying mechanisms across a range of neurodegenerative diseases. For her doctoral work, Lasya applies machine learning and statistical modeling to large multivariate datasets to build informative imaging signatures of Alzheimer’s disease. This could aid early diagnosis, prognosis, and targeted treatment efforts. As an undergraduate, Lasya worked with Dr. Alexander Lin at the Center for Clinical Spectroscopy, Harvard Medical School, to identify biomarkers of neurological diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy in professional athletes. Lasya received her B.S. in Neuroscience, computational track, from Yale University in 2019.
Emily
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Emily is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a Gates-Cambridge Scholar. Her research interests include learning, mental health in adolescence, and early life stress. She is currently investigating the ways in which social isolation influences adolescent learning, mental health, and reward processing, and whether social media may help remediate the effects of isolation. In addition, she applies neuroimaging techniques to understand how brain structure and function develop in adolescence and how these factors relate to behavior.
Dr. Andreas
PhD from the University of Oxford
Andreas is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD at the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. His work has revolved around the challenges involved when dealing with data at a massive scale which are primarily sourced from mobile devices. His general research interests include the broad field of Data Analytics which is an interesting intersection of computer science, systems programming and mathematics.
Carolina C.R.
PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Carolina is a PhD student in the Committee of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are at the intersection of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Molecular Biology. She’s currently focused on understanding how sleep apnea disrupts brain networks important for memory and learning. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Biology, during which time she worked extensively on identifying and characterizing mutations in the human population that may disrupt dopamine signaling. During this time, she also worked in identifying the effects of pH on the activity of proteins that have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. Carolina has a long history of biomedical research that has been funded by the National Institutes of Health in fields such as human genetics, translational nanotechnology, and neurobiology.
Carmen P.
PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge
Carmen is a PhD candidate in Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge. Her current PhD research focuses on cardiovascular disease risk prediction and multimorbidity. Previously, she worked on the validation of a breast cancer risk prediction model, which uses both genetic and traditional epidemiological risk factors. Carmen received her Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from Imperial College London and holds a Master’s degree in Epidemiology from the University of Cambridge. Carmen first gained her bioinformatics skills through her undergraduate research, analyzing transcriptomic and Hi-C data.
Dr. Johan A. T.
Postgraduate Research Associate at Princeton University
Johan finished his PhD in Politics at Princeton in 2022 and currently works as a freelance writer in Norway. In his dissertation, on the political theory of work, he developed a new framework for understanding the institution of work, and for assessing its contemporary transformations, as well as proposals for how to reshape the institution going forward. Johan is broadly interested in the history of modern political and social thought, contemporary theories of capitalism and democracy, and normative political philosophy. Before coming to Princeton, Johan completed a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford.
Frederik
PhD candidate at the Institute of Innate Immunity in Bonn, Germany
Frederik is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Innate Immunity in Bonn (GER). More specifically, he works at the Department for Neuroimmunology lead by Prof. MT Heneka. His laboratory work began at the German Sports University in Cologne with experimental exercise interventions to treat hypertensive disorders. Now, he is involved in fundamental research emphasizing neuroinflammation in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. His current work at the University Hospital Bonn and German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases predominantly focuses the study of interaction sites between brain resident neuronal and immunologic cell-populations.
Ahmed Othman
PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge
Ahmed is a Ph.D. researcher in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His project focuses on thin-film formation via drying of cosmetic products in collaboration with Unilever UK. The project investigates final film morphology and the stability of droplets during and after the drying of cosmetic formulations. The project combines both computational and experimental methods ranging from optical imaging, surface characterization, infrared spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy which are complemented by mathematical modeling. Ahmed is currently supervising second-year undergraduate students in introduction to chemical engineering, fluid mechanics, and chemical engineering laboratories. Ahmed completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Leeds in 2018. He worked on his postgraduate research project to encapsulate phase change materials (PCMs) with metallic shells, which store and release energy during temperature fluctuations. These can be commercially used to optimize heat transfer in industrial applications e.g. heat exchangers and domestic heating.
Édgar C.
PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Édgar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago, where his research focuses on developmental neurobiology. Using a combination of molecular and genetic techniques, such as CRISPR-mediated gene editing, he studies how motor neurons establish and maintain functional synapses. Édgar received his Bachelor’s degree in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras, where he worked on optimizing novel site-directed gene editing tools employed to correct mutations within the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator. Overall, he has performed extensive biomedical research that has been funded by the National Institutes of Health in fields such as cell and molecular biology, genetics, and developmental neurobiology.
Anh N.
PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Anh is a Ph.D. candidate and Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. Informed by Critical Theory’s critique of modernism, colonialism, and nationalism, her research concentration lies at the intersection of print culture, urban politics, gender, and emotion in modern Asia. Fundamentally, her research engages with two sets of questions. The former concerns the condition of freedom: the encounter with the Other, forms of agency in tragedies, and the possibility of politics in everyday life. The latter confronts the condition of historical writing: concept work, the possibility of writing world history and history in the plural, and positionality. Since 2019, she has presented her work at eight academic conferences, translated four books on Philosophy and History into Vietnamese, and instructed two classes at UChicago. She was also the recipient of the highly prestigious Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellowship, awarded to the most talented Ph.D. students whose outstanding academic accomplishments thus far demonstrate their promise as scholars and teachers capable of making important contributions to their fields.
Paddy
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Paddy is a PhD candidate in fluid dynamics at the University of Cambridge. He specializes in environmental flows and his research focuses on the geological storage of carbon dioxide as a means of reducing carbon emissions. Paddy also holds a first class undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering MEng from the University of Edinburgh. At Cambridge, he has four years of experience supervising Cambridge undergraduates in advanced fluid mechanics. Paddy has collaborated with industry extensively throughout his studies and has also developed a deep understanding of renewable energy technologies and the challenges we face in transitioning our energy system.
Dr. Eoghan Mulholland
Research Fellow at the University of Oxford
Dr. Eoghan Mulholland is the Lee Placito Research Fellow in Gastrointestinal Cancer at the
University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow of Somerville College Oxford. Before
starting at the University of Oxford, Eoghan completed his doctoral studies at Queen’s
University Belfast where he studied and developed novel gene therapy options for tissue
regeneration. Eoghan’s current research explores how cells from the immune system and
stromal compartment communicate with cancer cells, and how this can be exploited for
cancer therapies. Eoghan has experience working with tissue cultures, animal models of
cancer, gene therapies, as well as protein and nucleic acid detection in situ.Nick Rekenthaler
PhD Candidate at New York University
Nick Rekenthaler is a PhD candidate in Sociology at New York University. His research interests center around the areas of medical sociology and mental health, punishment and social control, morality, and culture. For his dissertation, he is investigating how “public issues” are discussed in the private arena of psychotherapy, as well as the ways psychotherapists exercise “moral authority.” He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago, with a double major in Psychology and Philosophy.
Dr. Connor T.
Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge
Dr. Connor T. is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and his research focuses on the intersections between chemistry, chemical engineering and computer science. In his own research, Connor utilizes machine learning for drug discovery techniques, automation in chemical reaction optimization and leveraging emerging chemical tools for novel pharmaceutical synthesis. He has a particular interest in topics that relate to flow chemistry, high-throughput experimentation, fragment-based drug discovery, reaction self-optimization, ML methods in chemistry and modern synthetic techniques. He has published several peer-reviewed papers and has had great success in tutoring students from the high school level all the way to PhD level and finds the process of writing/reviewing papers very rewarding. He has an excellent track record of developing his tutees and is open to further students.
Pramit
PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford
Pramit is a PhD candidate in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and part of its Biomedical Image Analysis (BioMedIA) cluster. His research interests primarily lie in the areas of machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, medical image analysis, brain computer interfaces, and human speech motor control. More specifically, Pramit’s work focuses on developing federated learning algorithms for facilitating multi-institutional collaborations in healthcare. He also works on solving challenges related to class imbalance, non-IID data distribution, self-supervised and semi-supervised learning. In 2020, Pramit was awarded the prestigious Young Scientist Award by MICCAI Society for his contributions towards developing machine learning models for artificial speech synthesis from tongue movements. Prior to this, Pramit graduated from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, with an MASc degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in February 2021.
Alexander P.
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Alexander is a PhD candidate at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Cambridge. His research is at the intersection of organic chemistry, machine learning and laboratory automation, aiming to develop automated reaction optimization workflows for applications in small molecule drug manufacturing and formulation chemistry. Before his PhD, Alexander conducted research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he developed new chemical reactors for continuous flow chemistry and chemical methods for continuous drug synthesis. Alexander obtained his MSc. from Vienna University of Technology in technical chemistry focusing on process chemistry and continuous flow synthesis. During his BSc. from University of Vienna in chemistry he focused on research projects in natural product synthesis. Alexander gained experience while working in or with industrial companies such as BASF for formulation optimization using machine learning, Thermo Fisher for API chemical process optimization and Unipharm for pharmaceutical quality assurance. Along his studies, Alexander has been the president of the Cambridge University Austrian Society, organizing invited talks, social events and cultural exchanges with diverse partners and participants from all over the globe.
Dillon
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Dillon is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the Centre for Misfolding Diseases, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on misfolding protein diseases and disorders. Most notably, he has designed high-throughput in vitro drug screening assays for tau protein in Alzheimer's disease and Pick’s disease. Other notable works of his include the effects of site-specific posttranslational modifications on the tau-microtubule complex, the biophysical characterization of aminosterols interactions with pore-forming peptides, and the aggregation kinetics of tau within droplets of a biphasic system. Dillon previously obtained his B.S. Biochemistry at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. Over 8 years, Dillon has also worked as a tutor. He has experience teaching students in material and lab practical skills from 5th grade to the graduate level. Beyond the lab, he is enrolled in an entrepreneurial certification programme at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He serves as an editor for the Cambridge Journal of Science & Policy (CJSP) and was the President of the postgraduate society of St John's College, University of Cambridge.
Jack
PhD Candidate at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech)
Jack is a PhD candidate at CalTech in the Social Science department. He received his MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge and BA from New York University Abu Dhabi. His current research revolves around decisions under uncertainty, with specific work on the Ellsberg Paradox and bargaining games. This work draws together current research in decision theory, experimental, and behavioural economics. He also has interests in political accountability, voting, and general political economy.
John Anagnost
PhD Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
John Anagnost is a PhD candidate in Health Policy and Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His specific interests are related to the application of microeconomic theory and statistics to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, as well as other public health policy issues. The healthcare industry is a broad and dynamic ecosystem in which individuals often have conflicting ideas about how to make it better with respect to quality, access, and cost. John is fascinated in the ways of thinking about public health problems from the perspective of economic theory. Specifically, he explores regulatory and market dynamics that influence behavior of participants within the ecosystem. However, John is also interested in general economic problems around antitrust, competition, and labor markets.
Maximillian Crane
PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford
Maximillian Crane is a Medical Research Council-funded DPhil (PhD) candidate in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on genetic status and pathological outcomes in progressive multiple sclerosis, an inflammatory neurodegenerative disease. Using a combination of anatomically detailed neuropathological techniques and proteomics, he hopes to identify molecular drivers of progressive multiple sclerosis. Prior to his DPhil Max completed bachelors (Nottingham) and masters (UCL) degrees in neuroscience and undertook a postgraduate fellowship at Yale University. Throughout his studies Max has tutored for both private companies and charities.
Debra Abramov
PhD Candidate at Cornell University
Debby Abramov is an eighth year MD/PhD candidate at the Tri-Institutional MD/PhD program at Weill Cornell. She completed in PhD in neuroscience at Weill Cornell and her research focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms of neuronal dysfunction caused by mutations in the chaperone protein Munc18-1. She is now completing her final year of medical school. Before pursuing her MD/PhD, she earned her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in New Haven, CT.
Aleksandar Petrov
PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford
Aleks is currently a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. Broadly speaking, his research focuses on robustness, reliability and trustworthiness of machine learning models. He wants to ensure that the machine intelligence used in autonomous driving and flight, in medical diagnostics and treatment, and in large language models is safe, compliant and fair. He is also interested in learning theory, statistics, deep learning, fairness, privacy and security. Prior to coming to Oxford, Aleks got his MSc at ETH Zürich, focusing on robotics, machine learning, statistics, and applied category theory. Before that, he studied Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft, where he worked on indoor drone flight and spacecraft trajectory optimization. He has also worked with autonomous driving and autonomous flight startups.
Valentine
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Valentine is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge. Her interdisciplinary research investigates the relationship between the opinions and priorities of palm oil producers and the environmental sustainability of their plantations. Her first author publications include a systematic literature review, studies on the effects of agricultural management on ecosystem functioning, and studies on the factors influencing smallholder farmer decision making. At the University of Cambridge, Valentine has supervised Undergraduate Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation courses, as well as oversaw the summer research project of a Cambridge Conservation Institute Undergraduate intern (First class honours received). Prior to her PhD, Valentine graduated with honours from University College Cork, and spent several years working on conservation research and action in Latin America. Outside of academia, Valentine recently worked for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company on sustainability projects from their New York Office.
Graham Reid
PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford
Graham is a cognitive neuropsychologist and PhD researcher, working with Dementias Platform UK within the department of psychiatry at the Univeristy of Oxford. His work focuses on modifiable risk factors for neurodegenerative disorders, focusing mainly on the relationship between type 2 diabetes mellitus and Alzheimer’s disease. His work uses blood biomarkers and neuroimaging technology to assess how the brain responds to insulin and how this action of the brain relates to people’s cognitive abilities, including memory, language, and attention. Prior to this work, he worked in the intersection of heart health and brain healthy in ageing adults with a particular focus on how the health of the arteries in the neck relate to blood flow dynamics in the brain. He has also taken a social approach to understanding people’s risk for mental health conditions and help-seeking behaviours with a particular interest in how religious belief influences people’s sense of wellbeing and their desire to use psychological services when facing psychiatric challenges. He has a keen interest in looking at individual differenes in people’s behaviour, minds, and body health since he believes that personalised and precision medicine is the way to support humans as they age through the lifespan.
Paul Gehret
PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania
Paul is a current PhD candidate in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on using novel stem cell sources and decellularized scaffolds to engineer cartilage. Specifically, he uses this engineered cartilage to repair and reconstruct the tracheas of children who require airway expansion. Paul’s research is highly translational and interdisciplinary with experience using large animal models such as rabbits and pigs. Additionally, Paul has interests in targeted drug delivery, biomaterial design, and science education. Outside of research Paul enjoys walking his dogs, hiking, cooking, and traveling the world.
Gerry Chen
PhD Candidate at Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Gerry Chen is a Robotics PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research focuses include computer vision for SLAM / SfM applications and state estimation. He has interned at Amazon’s self-driving company Zoox, where he developed object tracking algorithms, and the Air Force Research Laboratory, where he worked on multi-vehicle state estimation. He has taught Intro to Robotics & Perception at Georgia Tech and TA’d numerous courses in addition to mentoring several undergraduate, Masters, and junior PhD students. Gerry holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a BSE from Duke University, where he led a team that built the world’s most fuel efficient vehicle and most efficient electric vehicle.
Dr. Jan C.Z.
PhD Researcher at the University of Cambridge
Jan graduated with a PhD from Downing College in applied mathematics in 2023. His research focus is machine learning for drug discovery, specialising in computer vision. Jan also has a Master's degree in theoretical physics also from Cambridge. He has taught undergraduate courses in mathematical biology and tutored 16-18 year old students in maths and physics. His research interests to date include generative imaging models (GANs, diffusion), including in cross-modality image-to-image prediction in medical and biological imaging. He has also worked on multi-model generative models and self-supervised learning.
Dr. Julian Day-Cooney
PhD, University of Chicago
Julian has a PhD in Neurobiology from the University of Chicago studying the mechanisms underlying visual perception. He recently began a postdoctoral fellowship at Oregon Health & Science University investigating emotion and memory. Combining state of the art technologies, computational models, and genetic techniques, he is defining the neural activity necessary to perceive emotional states and how they influence our behavior. In addition to neuroscience research, Julian is a dedicated educator and earned a college teaching certificate upon graduation. Prior to coming to University of Chicago, he has held research positions at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Pittsburgh studying the perception of complex visual scenes and methods to aid recovery from traumatic brain injury, respectively. He has earned a bachelor of science degree in neuroscience as well as bachelor of arts degrees in Philosophy and English writing from the University of Pittsburgh.
Jack Kolb
PhD Candidate at Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Jack Kolb is pursuing his PhD in Robotics at Georgia Tech. His research is broadly in human-robot interaction, where he enables robot teammates to leverage a user's individual skills and world state understanding to predict user behavior and better support the team's shared goals. He has approached these challenges through several lenses, including robot learning from demonstration, applied machine learning, and shared mental models. Outside of academia, Jack has worked at the self-driving vehicle company Gatik, where he researched how autonomous vehicles can accurately forecast the movement of surrounding vehicles. He also worked at NextGenAT developing smart home systems for assisted living communities. Jack received his M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, and his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Riverside, where he designed autonomous underwater robots to compete in marine navigation and interaction challenges. In his free time, Jack plays classical piano and leads Georgia Tech's robotics graduate student association.
Saba Ishrat
PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford
Saba Ishrat is a PhD candidate in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, where her research primarily focuses on the impact of substance use and addiction on brain health. Specifically, she examines how Cannabis exposure influences brain structure and functional connectivity using brain imaging techniques. She also investigates the associated risks of Cannabis use on later-life psychiatry and cognitive outcomes. Additionally, she plans to incorporate genetic data into her research to better understand the causal relationship between cannabis use and long-term neurocognitive outcomes. During her academic journey, Saba gained valuable research experience in diverse settings. She worked as a Research Intern at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, where she focused on investigating the fiber estimation and tractography in diffusion MRI. Subsequently, she worked as a Junior Researcher at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, contributing to the EPISTOP project. Her role involved medical image analysis, investigating the biomarkers of epilepsy risks and neurodevelopment in infants with Tuberous Sclerosis Complex. Before pursuing her DPhil, Saba completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Psychology at Aligarh Muslim University in India. She also obtained a Master's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Trento in Italy.
Former Instructors
Matthias Siemer
Research Scientist and Lecturer, Yale University
Dr. Matthias Siemer is a Lecturer and Research Scientist at Yale University, where his research interests focus on human emotions and statistical methods. He received his PhD at Free University Berlin, Germany in 1999. He has served as an Associate Professor at Greifswald University in Germany from 1999 to 2005. After that, he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University before he became a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. He has served as a Research Scientist and Lecturer at Yale since 2014. Dr. Siemer has taught a wide variety of course in Germany and in the US. Most recently, he taught classes in Human Emotion and Research Methods at Yale.
Payton Jones
PhD Researcher at the Harvard University
Payton Jones is a current doctoral candidate in Clinical Science at Harvard University. He is interested in machine learning and quantitative approaches to studying mental health. Payton develops open-source software in R and conducts applied research that uses network science to study emotional disorders. He is also interested in how modern sociocultural attitudes and practices impact psychopathology and how these factors relate to stagnant or increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Some of his recent research explores whether individuals' beliefs about trauma influence how vulnerable they are to PTSD, and to what extent those beliefs can be influenced.
Erika DeBenedictis
PhD Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Erika DeBenedictis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She uses directed evolution to expand the genetic code to include chemically diverse amino acids. To enable this work, she develops technologies for accelerating biological research using laboratory robotics. In addition, she researches the molecular basis of CRISPR, and is interested in the ethics of applying gene editing techniques.
Alim Ladha
PhD Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alim Ladha is a PhD researcher in Feng Zhang's lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of Biological Engineering. His research is focused on the development and application of new tools for gene editing. This includes the discovery of new CRISPR enzymes with previously unknown function, engineering existing CRISPR systems with novel functions, and exploration of natural systems for delivery of CRISPR proteins. Before his PhD, Alim was an undergraduate at Duke University with a research focused degree in Biomedical Engineering. His projects included the use of stem cell-derived blood vessels for both treating and modeling disease, and metabolic engineering of microorganisms to reduce the cost of expensive drugs. Alim was also a researcher at the world's first stool bank, OpenBiome, where he used data analytics to help design and validate a treatment that has been used in over 50,000 patients. He has a wealth of teaching experience from multiple courses, including engineering the immune system to treat disease and electrical systems engineering for biomedical engineers.
Dr. Ema Tanovic
PhD, Yale University
Ema Tanovic earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Yale University. As part of her degree, she completed a year-long clinical fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she provided psychotherapy and assessment to patients across the health system. Prior to beginning her graduate work, Ema graduated with high honors from Wesleyan University. Broadly, her research investigates the cognitive, affective, and behavioral mechanisms of anxiety. Ema is particularly interested in characterizing how people respond to uncertainty and how excessive responses in uncertain situations may confer risk for the development of mood and anxiety disorders. To ask these questions, Ema uses various methods, including event-related potentials, peripheral psychophysiology, and behavioral tasks. Her dissertation focused on the development of a novel paradigm to study avoidance under uncertain threat.
Erik N.
PhD Candidate at Harvard University
Erik is a clinical psychology PhD student at Harvard University. Erik studies how language influences emotion: How do the words and concepts we have for emotions influence how we experience, perceive, and manage our emotions? Erik uses neuroimaging (fMRI), developmental, translational, and psycholinguistic tools to explore these questions. For example, he has studied how the ability to specifically label our emotions develops across age and how this ability relates to mental health. Erik is currently a clinical psychology intern at Weill-Cornell Medical School.
Colin Quirk
PhD Candidate at University of Chicago
Colin Quirk is a current PhD candidate in Psychology at the University of Chicago. His interest in psychology began as an undergraduate at Hampshire College where he served as manager of a lab examining the relationship between the neural activity of children and visual attention. He went on to work as a lab manager studying long-term memory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before moving to Chicago for his PhD work. Currently, Colin uses electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking methods to study working memory. Of particular interest to Colin is the use of “big data” and deep neural networks to understand how individuals choose to encode information. He has taught and assisted with multiple courses related to research methods and statistics. When he is not working on his research, Colin enjoys helping other graduate students with their technical problems through a student group he runs.
Andrew Stier
PhD Candidate at University of Chicago
Andrew is a PhD researcher in the Integrative Neuroscience program at the University of Chicago. His research is focused in the area of Environmental Neuroscience which focuses on understanding how the social and physical environment interaction with the brain and behavior. He draws on his background in Math and Physics in applying computational methods from hierarchy theory, complex systems theory, and network theory to investigate these interactions. In practice this involves using a diverse set of large datasets, including fMRI data, online and telephone based surveys, government census data, social media data, and human mobility data from cell phone tracing, to understand how the physical environment, social networks, and brain networks and brain activity interact to influence rates of depressive disorders.
Irene Li
PhD Candidate at Yale University
Irene Li is a PhD candidate at Yale University, and her research interests are machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. She has been worked on various projects including clinical notes processing, twitter emotion analysis, and text summarization.
Patrick Liu
PhD Researcher at University of Oxford
Patrick is a PhD student in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford, where he is funded by a Marshall Scholarship. His research takes a neurobiology approach to understanding the molecular processes underlying sleep homeostasis, and more broadly, how neural circuits are able to temporally integrate information to effect meaningful behavioral output. In undergrad, he triple majored in Biological Sciences, Neuroscience, and Psychology, and his pedagogical interests lie at the intersection of these three interdisciplinary topics. Prior to starting his PhD work, Patrick taught at an accelerated science high school on a Fulbright Fellowship. Following his PhD, he will return to the US for medical school to become a physician-scientist.
Soufiane Aboulhouda
PhD Candidate at Harvard University
Soufiane Aboulhouda is a PhD Candidate in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard Medical School. His research in the lab of Dr. George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is focused on utilizing genome engineering and multiplexed in-vivo CRISPR libraries to develop next generation cell therapies. He completed his bachelors degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his interest in genetics began. After college, he spent 3 years at the University of California, San Francisco studying RNA biology and gene regulation. Soufiane is currently the Head Tutor for Harvard’s GetSmarter CRISPR Gene Editing course, is the President of the Harvard Biotech Club, a student organization that bridges the gap between academia and industry, and the co-founder of Activate a life sciences entrepreneurship program designed to help facilitate company formation from Harvard and MIT labs.
Grace H.
MD / PhD Candidate at the University of Chicago
Grace is an MD/PhD candidate at the University of Chicago studying human genetics. Her research focuses on how non-coding genetic variants affect the expression of genes, and how this affects cellular function and individuals’ risk for disease. Currently, she is studying how genetic variants affect fat storage, and why some individuals stay somewhat metabolically ‘healthy’ if they become obese, while others do not. She has also described genetic variants affecting brain development in childhood, and studied the genetic architecture of asthma and cardiovascular disease. Prior to the University of Chicago, Grace worked at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she used neuroimaging methods, including fMRI and PET, to understand brain development and schizophrenia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in the sciences in cognitive neuroscience, as well as a bachelor’s degree in arts in English literature, from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Clinically, Grace is interested in psychiatry, neurology, and obstetrics.
Alexander Jay
Litigation Consultant; Research Associate at Wilfrid Laurier University
Alex earned his PhD in Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he studied topics at the intersection of Psychology and Law, including jury decision-making, false confessions, plea-bargaining, interrogations, criminal profiling, and eye-witness identification. Broadly, Alex’s research focuses on social psychological, social cognitive, and mnemonic processes in jury decision making. Alex’s dissertation research examined how jurors’ perceptions of civil litigants affect their decision-making, and how varying jurors’ perceptions can predictably affect their emotional reactions, causal attributions, verdicts, and damage awards. He obtained his Master of Science in Psychology from Arizona State University (ASU) in 2015, completing his thesis on jurors' decision making in cases with defendants that might cause jurors to experience a feeling of collective guilt, such as war veteran defendants. His work has been published in journals such as Psychiatry, Psychology, and Law as well as Topics in Cognitive Science, and he has co-authored publications in Group Processes & Intergroup Relations and The Jury Expert.
Leo Vo
PhD Candidate at Columbia University
Leo is a PhD candidate in the Sternberg Lab at Columbia University. His main area of research is cutting-edge technologies for genome engineering applications, particularly CRISPR applications in bacteria. He is also interested in studying the underlying mechanisms and biology of CRISPR systems within their natural environment, as well the role CRISPR and other gene editing technologies will play in shaping society. Beyond the lab, Leo also is an admirer of all things technology, and is an avid tennis player.
Dr. Alex R.
Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University
Alex is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University where she studies how neural processing of social information and real-world social experiences during adolescence impact trajectories of risk for psychopathology. Her overarching research question is "Why does mental illness happen?" to which she takes a social, developmental, and neuroscience lens. Alex received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Harvard University. In her dissertation research, she studied how neurodevelopmental shifts during adolescence shape learning and motivational processes in the context of peer acceptance and rejection.
Dr. Ling Y.
Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge
Ling has pursued her career in science in three continents. She received her B.S. in biology from Peking University in 2014 and Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Princeton University in 2020, and is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. She has a diverse background in bioinformatics, genomics, gene editing, evolution, physiology, and neuroscience. During her Ph.D., she combined molecular, computational, and field work together to study the evolution of toxin resistance in various animals like snakes, lizards, frogs, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers - and the list goes on! At the current stage, Ling is working on characterizing different human cells at the single-cell resolution. Ling loves photo editing and has recently gotten into gardening.
Emma R.
PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge
Emma is a third year PhD student in the Artificial Intelligence Group at Cambridge. She studied both Medicine and Engineering before starting her PhD in Computer Science. Her research sits at the interface between medicine and machine learning. She is particularly interested in deep learning techniques to exploit Electronic Health Records to improve the efficiency and efficacy of healthcare delivery in the Intensive Care Unit. She has worked with autoencoders, recurrent neural networks (LSTM, GRU), convolutional networks, graph neural networks, reinforcement learning and attention (Transformers).
Erin Berlew
PhD Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania
Erin is a current doctoral candidate in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research is focused on engineering light-controlled, genetically encoded proteins that can be turned on and off to control cell physiology. Specifically, she develops protein tools to study cell signaling and the dynamics of the cytoskeleton. She is also interested in protein structure-function relationships, small molecule biosynthesis, imaging technologies, and science education.
Our Staff
These talented individuals will be assisting you alongside your assigned academic mentor as you complete your Horizon Project. The Horizon Academic Research Program's team oversees the logistical aspects of our high school research program. We run Horizon's in-house writing center, oversee scheduling matters, and provide ongoing advice and support for students as they engage in the process of academic research.
Our team collaborates with (and is distinct from) our 83 academic instructors from universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, Cambridge, Oxford, and Columbia. You can view a list of some of our academic instructors here.
David Weeks
B.A. from Swarthmore College
Global Outreach Lead
David Hansen
M.A. from Texas Tech University
Academic Lead
Keating Sherry
B.A. from University of Miami
North America Outreach Lead
Lucas Hunter
M.F.A. from Purdue University
Program Associate
Nika Hajikhoda-verdikhan
M.S. from the London School of Economics (LSE),
B.A. from University of California, Berkeley
Program Associate
Jessica Norris
Ph.D. (c) from Georgetown University
B.A. from University of California, Santa Barbara,NRDC fellow
Environmental Science Course Assistant
Haley Frevert
M.A. from The John Hopkins University
International Relations Course Assistant
Dr. Daniele Cassese
Mead Research Fellow and College Lecturer, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
Economics Course Assistant
Paige Hann
B.A. from Yale University
Program Associate and Interviewer
Davida Kollmar
M.S. from NYU
B.A. from Yeshiva University
Data Science & Machine Learning Course Assistant
Shan Liu
B.A. from Juniata College
Technology Lead
David Choi
B.A. from University of Pennsylvania
Writing Assistant
Scott Dobbins
M.S. from Stanford University
B.A. from Columbia University
Program Advisor, Former Program Director
Ani Nadiga
M.S. from University of Glasgow
B.A. from Carleton College
Writing and Publications Coordinator
Zhanar Irgebay
B.A. from University of Pennsylvania, M.A. from University of Chicago
Program Associate
Nicole Posadas
B.A. from University of Pennsylvania
Program Associate
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