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.
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.
Eden received a BS degree in Biological Sciences from UC Irvine and a PhD in Neuroscience from UC Davis. Her doctoral work broadly focused on learning, memory, and synaptic plasticity. Now, as a member of the Boxer Lab, she is interested in facilitating more equitable and inclusive research of neurodegenerative disorders.
After over a decade in education leadership, teaching, leading teams, and developing programs in the arts, humanities, and medical education, I am using these skills to translate neuroscience research into programs and products that tackle inequity in health and education. As an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Global Brain Health, I worked with colleagues at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, the Division of Geriatrics, and at Trinity College Dublin to develop protocols for intervening in modifiable risk factors for dementia across the life course with a focus on marginalized older people.
Rituja Bhowmik earned a Bachelor of Science degree in nutrition and metabolic biology from UC Berkeley in May 2025. During her undergraduate studies, she conducted wet-lab research and developed a passion for basic science, culminating in an honors thesis on transcription in the human placenta. She is dedicated to community health and previously worked as a bilingual community health worker, serving various patient populations in the East Bay, including at Highland Hospital.
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.
Morgan is a clinical research coordinator in the Rosen Lab who works on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), Longitudinal Early-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Study (LEADS) and UCSF Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) studies.
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.
