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.
Paula earned her medical degree from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru. She joined the ALBA Lab as a research assistant on the Multitudes project and is currently working as an assistant clinical research coordinator at the Dyslexia Center.
Meghan earned her Bachelor of Science degree from UC Irvine in June 2025. While at UC Irvine, she worked with Dr. Aaron Bornstein studying decision-making and memory in older adults.
Currently, she serves as an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator in Dr. David Perry’s lab. Her research interests include studying neurodegenerative diseases and their effects on decision-making and memory.
Miranda graduated from UC Berkeley in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. She previously worked at the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab, where she studied the emotions, health, and relationship outcomes of caregivers of people with dementia. Now at the Memory and Aging Center, she works on the Frontotemporal Dementia: Genes, Images, and Emotions study. In the future, Miranda plans to attend medical school.
Dr. Juliana Friend is a medical anthropologist specializing in ethnographic and community-engaged qualitative research. Drawing on expertise in digital health, bioethics, and privacy studies, Dr. Friend's work addresses the intersection of tech policy and health policy and aims to amplify the perspectives of diverse constituents on how to amplify the benefits of emerging technologies while minimizing potential harms.
Marlene is a neuroimaging data analyst in the Rabinovici Lab. Originally from Guangdong, China, she received her BS degree in computational biology from UCLA in 2023 and her MS degree in health data science from UCSF in 2025. She joined the lab in late 2023 to pursue her capstone project on data-driven tau-PET subtypes in sporadic early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and now supports various ongoing research projects related to Alzheimer’s disease.
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.
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.
