Language

People primarily focused on studying speech and language.

Celina Alba, MS

Staff Research Associate

Celina graduated from the University of San Diego with a BA degree in Behavioral Neuroscience and a minor in Philosophy before she obtained her MS degree in Neuroimaging and Informatics from the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

Nilgoun Bahar, PhD, SLP

Postdoctoral Scholar

Nilgoun Bahar, SLP, PhD, is a postdoctoral research scholar in the ALBA Lab at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, where she works primarily on the Dyslexia Project. She earned her PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford’s Brain, Speech, and Language Lab and holds a clinical master’s degree in speech-language pathology from the University of Toronto. She completed her clinical residency at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto.

Maya Bardorf, BA

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Maya graduated from Middlebury College in 2024 with a BA degree in neuroscience and a minor in art history. During her time at Middlebury, she contributed to a research project investigating gender and sex differences in visuospatial abilities among children using the Judgment of Line and Position Task (JLAP). Maya also spent a summer as a research assistant in the Hammack Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Vermont, where she studied the neurobiological underpinning of anxiety-like and depression-like behaviors.

Nicoletta Biondo, PhD

Specialist

Nicoletta holds a PhD degree in Psychological Sciences and Education from the University of Trento and a Master’s degree in Linguistics and Cognitive Studies from the University of Siena. Her research bridges theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience to investigate how linguistic information is processed in the brain across different populations, including healthy and brain-injured monolingual and bilingual adults, using methods such as eye-tracking, EEG, and neuroimaging.

Christine Boesch

Neuropsychology Intern

Christy Boesch is a 3rd year PsyD student at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She received her BS degree in 2017 from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo in Child Development with a Psychology and Studio Art minor. In 2019 she graduated with her MS degree in Infancy and Early Childhood Development from University College London. Christy conducted research with the Anna Freud Centre in London, UK, which evaluated how parental mental health correlated with children's cognitive development.

Shirley Chen

Clinical Project Coordinator

Shirley was born in Guangzhou, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmacology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as a certified pharmacy technician, gaining patient care experience in the emergency department and on the surgical nursing floor at USC Arcadia Hospital.

Hannah Cho

Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator

Hannah graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022 with a BS degree in Neuroscience. At USC, she was a research assistant at the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute using histology techniques to visualize fluorescently labeled neural circuits. She also studied the effects of sex hormones on Alzheimer’s disease as a research assistant at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Hannah has experience performing immunohistochemistry, perfusion-fixation surgery, confocal microscopy, and imageJ analysis.

Jessica de Leon, MD

Associate Professor

Jessica de Leon, MD, is an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences and a clinician-researcher at the Edward and Pearl Fein Memory and Aging Center. She serves as the lead and founder of the Filipino outreach program at the Fein Memory and Aging Center. Dr.