UCSF’s innovative, collaborative approach to patient care, research and education spans disciplines across the life sciences, making it a world leader in scientific discovery and its translation to improving health.
Dr. Watson graduated from the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology-Stanford PsyD Consortium in 2014. She has a background in psychology, developmental biology, neuroimaging and neuropsychology. Her research interests include brain development across the lifespan and, in particular, in the neuroscience of typical and atypical learning. She is currently working in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab with Dr. Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini.
Dr. Perry graduated from medical school at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He completed an internship in internal medicine and residency in neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where he also researched obsessive-compulsive features in dementia. He is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Memory and Aging Center and participates in the evaluation and treatment of patients in the MAC clinic.
His current area of research interest is the impact of neurodegenerative illness on reward processing.
Stefania Pezzoli completed her PhD degree in Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her research aimed to investigate the neural and cognitive correlates of visual hallucinations in Lewy body disease and Alzheimer’s disease by integrating multimodal neuroimaging and neuropsychological measures.
Hieu Pham received his BA degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology with an emphasis on Neurobiology from UC Berkeley. He is from Sacramento, California, and plans to pursue medical school in the future. At the Memory and Aging Center, Hieu is part of the team working on the frontotemporal dementia program project grant, Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Images and Emotions.
Janhavi Pillai is an imaging data assistant at the ALBA Lab. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA degree in Cognitive Science and a minor in Data Science. Janhavi has previously worked as a research assistant at the UCSF Kheirbek Lab, where she examined and compared the roles of the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and ventral hippocampus in fear and anxiety behaviors.
Stefanie Piña Escudero is a geriatrician working to understand and reduce the impact of social vulnerability on older adults with cognitive impairment. She is collaborating with the Multi-Partner Consortium to Expand Dementia Research in Latin America to develop a better understanding of dementia in the region with a special focus on social factors such as mistreatment.
Stefanie received her medical school training from the National University of Mexico where she completed her training in Geriatrics. She received her Internal Medicine training from La Salle University.;
Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, PhD, studies the neural architecture and dynamics of human intelligence, focusing on symbolic cognitive systems, such as mathematics and language. His research program aims at understanding how these systems develop and decline and how we can help.
Mariah L. Pospisil, MEd, is a lifelong educator and advocate for students with dyslexia. After receiving her AB degree in Psychology from Harvard College, Mariah earned her teaching credential and Master of Education as an Education Specialist, Mild/Moderate from Notre Dame de Namur University. As a teacher, instructional coach, and school leader, Mariah focused on implementing instructional and social-emotional interventions to support students with dyslexia throughout their K–12 educational journeys.
