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.
Destine Williams is a Staff Research Associate in the Specimens Processing Lab. She is from Phoenix, Arizona, and studied at Purdue University, where she earned a BS degree in Psychology. She plans to pursue medical school later in the future.
Mia received her BA degree in Psychology from Rice University. She joined the MAC as an Assistant Clinical Research Coordinator on the Language/PPA Team. Previously, she worked as a Research Assistant at the T-SCAN Lab. She is passionate about utilizing research to develop targeted interventions for underserved and underrepresented populations. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, bullet journaling, and trying new restaurants.
Rochelle-Jan (RJ) Reyes (they/she) is a staff research associate in the de Leon Lab at UCSF. With Dr. de Leon and members of the lab, they support the Bilingualism Study that aims to investigate bilingualism’s effect on healthy aging and neurodegenerative disease. RJ is also a PROPEL scholar at UCSF.
Dr. Luke Fischer (he/his) is a neurologist-neuroscientist with an interest in Lewy body disease. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Michigan State University with degrees in Philosophy and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and he remained there to complete his PhD degree in Neuroscience in the laboratory of Dr. Caryl E. Sortwell as part of a dual-MD/PhD program. As a trainee in the NINDS Morris K.
Stefania Pezzoli completed her PhD degree in Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her research aimed to investigate the neural and cognitive correlates of visual hallucinations in Lewy body disease and Alzheimer’s disease by integrating multimodal neuroimaging and neuropsychological measures.
Rowan graduated from Middlebury College in May 2024 with a major in Sociology and a minor in Global Health. She joined the UCSF Memory and Aging Center (MAC) in June 2024 as a clinical research coordinator in the Dementia Imaging Genetics Lab led by Dr. Suzee Lee, where she coordinates a study investigating the neurodevelopment of children from families with a history of frontotemporal dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
Sevinç joined the Seeley Lab as a postdoctoral scholar in October 2023. She completed her BSc degree in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Boğaziçi University in Turkey. She then moved to Germany, where she earned her MSc degree in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology from Heidelberg University. Her Master's thesis focused on establishing culture conditions for circulating tumor cells from breast cancer patients in the lab of Andreas Trumpp at the German Cancer Research Center.
