member

Xavier graduated from UC Berkeley in May 2023 with a double major in Psychology and Social Welfare. During college, he worked in the Family & Culture Lab with Dr. Qing Zhou as a research assistant investigating the links among bilingual development, executive function, parent-child and teacher-child relationships, and socio-emotional development in young children from Mexican American and Chinese American families. He also worked in La Clínica de la Raza as an Integrated Behavioral Health Volunteer serving undocumented individuals in the East Bay. 

Katherine graduated from the University of California, Davis with a BS degree in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. During her time in college, she explored various paths, including an internship at the local hospital as well as working at the COVID Testing Facility at UC Davis. She is currently working with the Sample Processing Laboratory at UCSF as a Lab Assistant to aid with the processing and shipping of various biospecimens for clinical studies.

Piyush is a Neuroimaging Data analyst in the RabLab, with experience in medical imaging. He obtained his master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from India.

Sean Coulborn is a postdoctoral researcher at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center under the mentorship of Dr. David Perry. His research focuses on improving the certainty of clinical diagnosis and predicting the pathological diagnosis in neurodegenerative diseases.

Originally from Sonoma County, Dolce attended college at UCLA, where she graduated with a degree in Psychology. While at UCLA, Dolce was a research assistant at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, studying the effects of behavioral therapy on children with autism spectrum disorder. She also served as a public speaker with the National Alliance on Mental Health, Westside LA, working to expand mental health awareness to young adults in the community.

Lana is a research coordinator in Dr. Joel Kramer’s lab working primarily on the Active Mind Clinical Trial as well as the Brain Aging Network for Cognitive Health study and the Mechanisms of Executive Decline study. She graduated with a BS degree in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior from UC Davis in June 2022

Valerie joined the Yokoyama Lab in 2023 as a staff scientist with a career-long interest in evaluating genetic factors involved in neurological diseases. She earned a PhD degree in Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, where she identified transcriptional regulation sequences for a gene involved in epilepsy and movement disorders. During her postdoctoral fellowship at NHGRI and UCSF, she studied the role of alpha-synuclein in Parkinson’s disease.

Luis Martinez Roman, MD, MPH, completed his medical studies at Universidad del Rosario, Colombia. He worked in the “Cedesnid” public foundation for people with low economic resources, disabilities, and neurological diseases in Bogota, Colombia. Luis received his master's degree in Neurology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the final year of his residency, he was selected to do a rotation in the Memory and Aging Unit at Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona, Spain.

Lucienne Vintaer is the program coordinator for the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab and serves as the executive administrative assistant to principal investigator Dr. Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini. Born and raised in San Francisco, she earned her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Psychology at Scripps College and discovered her interest in brain health while working for the University’s Disability Resource Center, supporting individuals with varying forms of neurodivergence.

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.