Language

Shirley was born in Guangzhou, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in pharmacology. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as a certified pharmacy technician and gained patient care experience in the emergency department and the surgical nursing floor at USC Arcadia Hospital.

Rayna was born and raised in Shenzhen, China. She holds an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge and dual BA degrees in English and Digital Media from the University of Rochester. At the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, she works as a clinical research coordinator in Dr. Tee’s lab, supporting study coordination and participant engagement for Chinese-speaking populations.

Joanne (Joe) Wu was born in Taishan, China, and moved to San Francisco at a young age. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in human biology from the University of California, San Diego. As an undergraduate researcher in the Zheng Lab at UC San Diego School of Medicine, she focused on spinal cord regeneration in mouse models.

Ally is an assistant clinical research coordinator at the ALBA Lab’s Dyslexia Center. Her research interests include developmental, clinical, and legal psychology. She plans to pursue a career that explores the intersection of psychology, mental health, and social systems.

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.

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.

Dr. Siebert is a quantitative researcher interested in linguistically equitable measurement in education and its influence on multilingual students’ educational trajectories. He is a Postdoctoral Scholar with UCSF’s Multitudes Project where he works on building a linguistically fair reading screener for Californian public schools. 

He completed his PhD degree in Developmental and Psychological Sciences and Education Data Science at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, under the supervision of Guillermo Solano-Flores.

Willa is a speech-language pathologist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab. Willa has a BA degree in Psychology from Lewis & Clark College and an MA degree in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Texas at Austin.