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.
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.
Jessica is a research coordinator in Dr. Joel Kramer’s lab, working primarily on the MarkVCID study. She graduated with a BA degree in Neurobiology from UC Berkeley in May of 2024 and hopes to continue pursuing her interests in neurodegenerative diseases as well as becoming a neurosurgeon.
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.
