staff

Chris Chow

Data Analyst

Chris works as a Data Analyst in the Memory and Aging Center under Dr. Kate Possin. Chris collaborates with the TabCAT team and Care Ecosystem project, where he excels in data visualization, statistical modeling, and data management. He works mainly in R and Python.

Xavier Lopez

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator – Care Team Navigator

Xavier graduated from UC Berkeley in May 2023 with a double major in Psychology and Social Welfare. During college, he worked in the Family & Culture Lab with Dr. Qing Zhou as a research assistant investigating the links among bilingual development, executive function, parent-child and teacher-child relationships, and socio-emotional development in young children from Mexican American and Chinese American families. He also worked in La Clínica de la Raza as an Integrated Behavioral Health Volunteer serving undocumented individuals in the East Bay. 

Brandon Palacios

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Brandon received a BA degree in neuroscience from Harvard in 2021. He is currently an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator for the Memory and Aging Center. Under Dr. Adam Staffaroni, he will be focused on implementing smartphone-based cognitive assessments for frontotemporal dementia. Furthermore, under Dr. Boxer and Dr.

Katherine Lirio

Lab Assistant

Katherine graduated from the University of California, Davis with a BS degree in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. During her time in college, she explored various paths, including an internship at the local hospital as well as working at the COVID Testing Facility at UC Davis. She is currently working with the Sample Processing Laboratory at UCSF as a Lab Assistant to aid with the processing and shipping of various biospecimens for clinical studies.

Piyush Maiti, MS

Neuroimaging Data Analyst

Piyush is a Neuroimaging Data analyst in the RabLab, with experience in medical imaging. He obtained his master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from India.

Sean Coulborn, PhD, MSc

Postdoctoral Fellow

Sean Coulborn is a postdoctoral researcher at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center under the mentorship of Dr. David Perry. His research focuses on improving the certainty of clinical diagnosis and predicting the pathological diagnosis in neurodegenerative diseases.

Dolce Martin-Moreno

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Originally from Sonoma County, Dolce attended college at UCLA, where she graduated with a degree in Psychology. While at UCLA, Dolce was a research assistant at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, studying the effects of behavioral therapy on children with autism spectrum disorder. She also served as a public speaker with the National Alliance on Mental Health, Westside LA, working to expand mental health awareness to young adults in the community.

Savannah Hallgarth

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Savannah is a research coordinator in Dr. Joel Kramer’s lab. She graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Cognitive Science program and is interested in the relationship between music and memory during the aging process. 

Lana Callies

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Lana is a research coordinator in Dr. Joel Kramer’s lab working primarily on the Active Mind Clinical Trial as well as the Brain Aging Network for Cognitive Health study and the Mechanisms of Executive Decline study. She graduated with a BS degree in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior from UC Davis in June 2022

Valerie Escobar, PhD

Specialist

Valerie joined the Yokoyama Lab in 2023 as a staff scientist with a career-long interest in evaluating genetic factors involved in neurological diseases. She earned a PhD degree in Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, where she identified transcriptional regulation sequences for a gene involved in epilepsy and movement disorders. During her postdoctoral fellowship at NHGRI and UCSF, she studied the role of alpha-synuclein in Parkinson’s disease.

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