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.
Athena studied Integrative Biology and Classics at UC Berkeley. She was involved in archaeological research and assisted the excavation of a prehistoric cemetery in Greece. On campus, she was a volunteer EMT and worked as a chef for her housing cooperative. Her experiences volunteering in hospice and nursing facilities led her to the Memory and Aging Center, where she assists patients, families, and caregivers with the autopsy program.
Nicholas (Nick) Schwartz, MD, PhD, is a Behavioral Neurology Fellow at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. He grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and obtained a BS degree in Neuroscience and Philosophy at Duke University, where his research focused on using egg-laying behavior to model decision-making in fruit flies. He completed his MD and PhD degrees at the Stony Brook University Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP), where his dissertation work focused on sphingolipid metabolism in neuropathy.
Dr. Seeley attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine, where he first encountered patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in 1999, during a research elective with Dr. Bruce Miller. He completed a neurology residency at Harvard Medical School, training at the Massachusetts General and Brigham & Women's Hospitals. Returning to UCSF for a Behavioral Neurology fellowship, Dr.
Marni graduated from the University of Florida with a BS degree in Psychology – Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience and a minor in Zoology. At UF, she was a Research Assistant for a Neurocognitive Lab studying addiction. She also coded qualitative data on the impact of COVID-19 on college students, created a scientific poster for an international conference and wrote a manuscript that is currently under review for publication. Marni was Clinic Manager at a Neuropsychology Clinic where she gained experience scoring and administering neuropsychological tests.
Dr. Shanaki Bavarsad received her PhD degree from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. Her PhD thesis was about the effects of CNS local production of IL-10 on neuroprotection and the inflammatory response (microglial activation and leukocyte recruitment) associated with a traumatic brain injury, by generating a new transgenic animal that overproduces this cytokine under the control of the GFAP promoter on astrocytes.
Ranjani graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science specializing in Clinical Aspects of Cognition. She is extremely interested in and passionate about neurodegenerative disease research, especially Alzheimer’s disease. She now works at the Memory and Aging Center in Dr. Rabinovici’s In Vivo Molecular Neuroimaging Lab.
Dr. Siebert is a quantitative researcher interested in linguistically equitable measurement in education and its influence on multilingual students’ educational trajectories. He is a Postdoctoral Scholar with UCSF’s Multitudes Project where he works on building a linguistically fair reading screener for Californian public schools.
He completed his PhD degree in Developmental and Psychological Sciences and Education Data Science at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, under the supervision of Guillermo Solano-Flores.
Nick Slater is a Clinical Research Supervisor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center where he he oversees studies related to the NIH-funded program project grant on frontotemporal dementia (the FTD PPG), ensuring compliance and operational efficiency while contributing to innovative research initiatives and fostering collaborative environments.
