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. Manizhe Eslami Amirabadi attended medical school in Yazd, Iran. Passionate about equity in healthcare, she then worked as a family physician for a year in an underserved area of Iran before starting her neurology residency in Tehran. She became interested in cognitive decline in the setting of chronic systemic illnesses and worked with chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients during her residency. She eventually moved to the US to pursue further training in cognitive neurology hoping to improve the quality of life for people living with dementia.
Zoe is a speech-language pathologist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab led by Dr. Marilu Gorno Tempini. Zoe has a BS degree in Cognitive Science with a specialization in neuroscience from UC San Diego and an MS degree in Speech-Language Pathology from Vanderbilt University.
A physician neuroscientist, Dr. Falke works on an applied neuroscience initiative to improve academic outcomes, such as reading and math, in school-age children. A major focus is generating scalable multi-dimensional learning profiles to guide targeted instruction. As he has for nearly a decade, Dr. Falke continues to serve as the Director of Targeted Interventions and Research at Carroll School, a school for children who struggle to learn reading in typical education environments.
Kristen joined the Selective Vulnerability Research Laboratory led by Dr. William Seeley in January 2022 as a research associate. She assists with neuroimaging data management and analysis. She received her BA degree in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis where she volunteered in the Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Lab.
D. Luke Fischer is a neurologist-neuroscientist with an interest in cognition in neuronal synucleinopathies. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Michigan State University with degrees in Philosophy and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and he remained there to complete his PhD degree in Neuroscience in the laboratory of Dr. Caryl E. Sortwell as part of a dual-MD/PhD program. As a trainee in the NINDS Morris K.
Taru received a bachelor of science degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego and completed a PhD degree in psychology in the Self-Regulation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. She joined the Dementia Imaging Genetics Lab in 2017 to support neuroimaging methods for understanding the underlying biology of genetic variants of frontotemporal dementia.
Executive Administrative Assistant to Francesca Pei, PhD
Melina Flores has worked in healthcare for over 15 years. She received a bachelor’s degree in Healthcare Management in 2015 and found working in the healthcare industry to be her passion, allowing her to nurture her desire to help others.
Originally from Huntsville, Alabama, Celeste earned her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While there, she took several philosophy courses, inspiring her interest in bioethics. Afterwards, Celeste enrolled in the Masters of Bioethics program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her thesis research consisted of examining ethical perspectives of identity in patients who had undergone deep brain stimulation for treatment resistant depression.
Adit Friedberg, MD, is a behavioral neurologist trained in the Department of Neurology at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. She received her medical degree from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (cum laude). She also completed a degree in Biotechnology Engineering (cum laude) from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Adit is a Global Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. She is currently a research fellow at the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF.
