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.
David is a Staff Research Associate at the ALBA Lab working under Dr. Jet Vonk on dementia research. He graduated from Columbia University with a BA degree in computer science and has previously worked at the Taub Institute at Columbia University Medical Center. His work focuses on generating new automated methods for analyzing verbal fluency across different languages.
Maison Abu Raya received her medical degree from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 2014. Maison completed her neurology residency at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera, Israel and passed the Israeli Neurology board exams with honors in 2019. She continued as an attending neurologist at the neurology department. In 2021, Maison joined the Stroke and Cognition Clinic at Rambam Health Care Campus as an attending physician and clinical fellow.
Lisa works as a research speech-language pathologist at the MAC. She earned her BA degree in English with a minor in Linguistics from Boston University in 2009 and her MA in Speech-Language Pathology from UT Austin in 2016. She has practiced speech pathology in a variety of settings, including a rehab hospital, home health and private practice. Her primary areas of research include assessment and treatment of aphasia and cognitive-communication disorders associated with stroke, neurodegenerative disease and traumatic brain injury.
Originally from Austin, Ellie graduated from the University of San Francisco with her BA degree in psychology in 2023. At the University of San Francisco, Ellie was a research assistant in the Learning and Memory Lab where she studied thought suppression and the rebound effect. She was also a research assistant in the Social Cognition Lab studying moral outrage in virtual settings.
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.
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.
Hannah graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022 with a BS degree in Neuroscience. At USC, she was a research assistant at the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute using histology techniques to visualize fluorescently labeled neural circuits. She also studied the effects of sex hormones on Alzheimer’s disease as a research assistant at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. Hannah has experience performing immunohistochemistry, perfusion-fixation surgery, confocal microscopy, and imageJ analysis.
