Elizabeth (Lizzie) Buchen

Sally Chege

I am an international student from Kenya, where I was born and lived until I was 17. After high school I moved to America in the fall of 2000 to pursue an undergraduate education. I attended Washington State University (WSU) where I had my first introduction to Neuroscience. The subject interested me greatly so I majored in Neuroscience and graduated this May (2004) with a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience. WSU was located in a small rural community and I look forward to the richness and diversity San Francisco will offer. In my free time I like traveling, singing and reading.

Christine Fu

I grew up in China and moved to Vancouver, Canada at the age of 16. My B.Sc. degree was Honors in Genetics with a Minor in Psychology, completed in the University of British Columbia. For my thesis I studied the role of gap junctions in tumor suppression using a glioma system. I speak Mandarin, Cantonese and was trying to learn a bit of German. Don't let my proximity to the famous ski resort Whistler fool you, for I am an embarrassingly unseasoned skier. I enjoy swimming, reading and Chinese poetry writing. I look forward to exploring both the hominess and distinctness of Canada's neighbor.

Carleton Goold

I'm from the Washington, D.C. area. Growing up, I got into science by working summers at NIMH, where I could bike from my house. I went to college at Harvard, where I joined a lab working on mammalian pheromones. To my dismay, I came away with an appreciation of neuroscience but little of "practical" value. I graduated this past June with an A.B. in Biochemical Sciences, though I mostly studied just chemistry and a hodgepodge of biology and other things. I road tripped out to California from Boston after I graduated for a few weeks of kayaking and skiing in the Sierras and Cascades, and hope to do more of the same in the coming years.

Danny Jones

I'm from a small town in central Illinois, and, for rather obvious reasons (the sunshine, the beach, and the availability of a certain "premium" two dollar wine at Trader Joe's), I moved to southern California four years ago to learn all about the liberal arts and sciences at Pomona College. Outside of Claremont, I spent summers at UNC - Chapel Hill and at Cold Spring Harbor, and also studied for one term at University College London. On the rare occasion that I'm not in lab recording from hippocampal slices, I enjoy playing racquetball and squash; beyond that, I'm a native speaker of American Sign Language, I listen to entirely too much music from 10-15 years before I was born, I really enjoy going to indie rock and punk shows, and I watch as much baseball as possible. I also try to get outdoors pretty often, and enjoy some casual backpacking and sailing when I get a chance.

Catherine Massaro

I grew up in Atherton, CA (just south of San Francisco), and I graduated from UC Berkeley in May of 2003. At Berkeley I majored in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Neurobiology, and I minored in French. For the past two years I have been working at the Gladstone Institute/UCSF in a lab studying Alzheimer's disease in transgenic mice. I speak French almost fluently, and I am very excited to be spending two months living in Paris this summer. I am also looking forward to being a student again this fall after my much-needed year off. In my free time, I like traveling (I went to Italy for the first time this spring and loved it), eating good food, and spending time with friends. I love pizza, the Cal Bears, and geeky science jokes. 

Leah McGuire

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. I just graduated from UC Santa Barbara, where I didn't spend nearly enough time at the beach, with a bachelor in biology and a minor in math. For the last two years I've been working in a lab studying potassium channels. I've never lived in a city before and I'm thinking it will be an interesting change. In my free time I enjoy reading fiction and hiking.

Aaron Milstein

I was born and raised in Mystic, CT, a small historical district on Long Island Sound. After forming a small web design and computer consulting company in CT, I set off to study computer science at MIT with aspirations of making it big in Silicon Valley one day. However, I kept talking about the brain with everyone I met, so I signed up for a degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and started doing some bench science for the first time with Mriganka Sur. Upon graduation, I stayed at MIT for one more year as a research assistant to Morgan Sheng. I'm looking forward to making frequent trips to Lake Tahoe in order to make up for years of traumatic experience skiing on ice and rocks in Vermont. Also, if anyone wants to go sailing on the Bay, take me with you! And teach me how to windsurf. This summer I traveled to my familial homeland of Kaua'i, Hawai'i for my dear cousin's wedding. Relaxed, refreshed, and sunburnt, I'm all set to jump into discovering the true nature of consciousness at UCSF!

Venu Nemani

I was born and grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana where I went to high school right across the street from Purdue University. I decided that I didn't want to go to college 2 minutes away from my parents' house, so I headed down south to North Carolina to go to Duke. I spent a couple summers doing research in Rochester, Minnesota, but later headed to Hawaii where I spent a summer mastering the reef breaks on the South Shore of Oahu and doing oceanography research at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. After 4 years of living in the South, I decided it was time to move out to California. When I'm not working, I enjoy surfing and competing in triathlons.

Vitaly Nimon (MSTP)

John O'Leary

After spending 18 years growing up in Minneapolis, MN, I moved to Chicago to attend college at the University of Chicago. For awhile there I thought that research in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing was my calling, and I thus earned a degree in Computer Science. In my fourth year, however, I realized what was truly interesting and joined a neuroscience lab, and I liked that work so much that I decided to stick around for a year after graduation to continue working in the same lab. Neuroscience grad school was the obvious next step. Beyond neuroscience, I can derive great pleasure from fundamental activities of life such as eating, drinking, and sleeping. Like many people these days, I think a wide variety of music is good, but I also think the music of J.S. Bach is the best music. More interests: Netflix is turning me into a bit of a film buff, I worry about world affairs a bit, lately I've been biking a lot, and I'm always ready for nerdy activities like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit. Finally, since I'll be living in an area that is much more suited to these activities, I hope to ski a lot more and maybe start windsurfing again.

Melinda Owens

I was born in Tokyo, Japan, but grew up in Stamford, CT, near New York City. I've just graduated from Caltech, and for the past two years, I've been working under Erin Schuman on dendritic protein synthesis in hippocampal neurons. My main scientific interest is in learning and memory. I've spent the past three weeks in Asia, including an exciting tour of China's Silk Road, and now am looking forward to immersing myself in science at UCSF.

Carol Peebles (MSTP)

I grew up in Santa Monica, CA and have always been a fan of sunshine and sunsets over the ocean. However, I decided at the end of high school to make the big trek out east where I attended Princeton University. I braved the cold, enjoyed the beautiful fall and spring colors, and sweated through the dog days of august. But soon sunshine and mountains beckoned and I came back to California to begin medical school here at UCSF as an MD/PhD student. I've just finished my second year of med school and am ready to put down the books and pick up the pipetman. Since moving to San Francisco I've taken up swing dancing, backpacked through the trinity alps, skied for the first time, and tried to learn the guitar.

Darya Pino

I grew up in southern California and at 17 moved to northern California to attend UC Berkeley. I majored in molecular and cell biology with an emphasis in neurobiology, but I also have an extensive background in literature. I studied abroad in Italy, 2000-2001, and I enjoy the Italian language and culture. Shortly after graduation I moved to San Francisco and have been living and loving it here ever since. For the last 2 years I have been working in a functional MRI lab at Berkeley studying memory, aging and neural networks, but I'm more than ready to get back into basic neuroscience. I love the outdoors, especially the beach and the mountains. I also enjoy music, running, reading, basketball and tacos.

Helen Shen

Originally from Thousand Oaks, CA, I attended junior and senior high school in Irvine, CA. I majored in biology and minored in psychology at Stanford University, graduating in 2002. Since then, I have continued to take classes at Stanford, while working in a lab that studies the molecular basis of sensory mechanotransduction in C. elegans. My passions include good food and classic rock; in my spare time, I enjoy taking interesting photographs, singing, and making my own jewelry. The only sport I play well is table tennis, but I enjoy watching basketball, hockey and soccer.

Annabelle Singer

After graduating from Wesleyan University, I spent a year on the Thai-Burmese border studying the psychological effects of armed conflict. It was there that I realized that understanding the subtle interactions between brain and environment necessitated an expert grasp of the mechanisms of the brain itself. My prior education was torn between field research in psychology and the more pure pursuits of studying the brain. When I returned to the US, I came to the D'Esposito Lab at UC Berkeley to study response selection in humans using fMRI and then the Fields Lab at UCSF to study addiction and reward circuitry. Especially drawn to the computational challenges of neuroscience, I hope to apply some of the techniques I studied in Topics in Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience with Yang Dan and Frederick Theunissen and other novel approaches to my graduate work. Outside of science, I love dancing, politics, film, and art.

Derek Southwell (MSTP)

Kay Tye

Benjamin Wiederhold (MSTP)

I am Ben, Ben I am.
I do not like mean ugly men.
Do you like brown mice with partial brains?
Try it, try it, and you may.
Try it, and you may, I say.
You may like to study brown mice and brains.

MSTP
Neuroscience graduate program
Undergraduate university: UC Davis
Undergraduate Major: Neurophysiology
Kids: 2
Wife: 1

Cindy Yang