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. Lorenzo Pasquini joined the Seeley lab in November 2016 as a postdoctoral fellow. He graduated in Neuroscience and Public Health at the Ludwig-Maximilan University of Munich. He obtained a PhD degree from the Technical University of Munich, where he worked under the mentorship of Dr. Christian Sorg at the Neuroimaging Center, studying large-scale brain network dysfunctions in Alzheimer’s disease, with a specific focus on multimodal neuroimaging and intrinsic activity of the medial temporal lobes.
Bettina Pedemonte completed a PhD degree in mathematics in Italy at Genoa University and a PhD degree in mathematics education in France at Grenoble University. She has experience in teaching mathematics, in particular to students with learning disorders. She designed technological environments to support mathematical learning. Her research interests include understanding cognitive processes involved in solving mathematical problems and finding new teaching methods to support mathematical learning. Bettina joined UCSF in March 2018, specializing in designing a battery for dyscalculia.
In addition to her doctorate degree in Developmental Neuroscience from the University of Pisa, Francesca Pei brings over 20 years of leadership, operational management and strategic planning in a variety of health care, research, academic and education settings. She joined UCSF in 2022 as the Chief Operating Officer for Applied Neuroscience projects in the ALBA Lab at the MAC.
Felipe is a bioinformatician with a computer science background. He received his PhD degree at Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 2019. In his PhD thesis, he studied host-pathogen interaction in important zoonotic fish-pathogenic bacteria. He had experience as a teacher assistant in Programming Languages and Software Engineering, and he worked in the National Reference Laboratory of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture using different types of omics technologies, such as transcriptomics and proteomics.
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.
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.
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.
