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Summer in SF means that the Decision Lab is back at the ballpark for garlic fries and beautiful bay views. Though we’ve had a run of SF’s infamous “June gloom” this month, the weather today was amazing and sunny. Also, while our Giants have honestly been a pretty boring team for the last few years and were expected to not do anything much this season, this year’s team has turned out to be a pretty scrappy and exciting group right in the middle of the playoff chase.

Today’s matchup unexpectedly got even more spicy as Rafael Devers, previously maybe the best hitter on the Red Sox, got traded to the Giants the week before our game. During the game, we got to see him hit his first home run as a Giant, against his former team. This ranks up with seeing Eddie Rosario hit for the cycle as one of the cooler baseball moments we’ve gotten to see together at a ballgame, and of course this one was better because it was to the Giants’ benefit. Someone proposed to his partner on the scoreboard, a pretty bold and romantic move (she said yes). And we got to see an exciting ending, coming down to the last out with the tying run at third base, which made for an excited and relieved crowd when the Giants pulled out the victory!

Sadly, it’s that time of year again, though it’s also exciting to see the next steps that our lab members are taking in their careers. We got together for some tasty Burmese food on Noah’s last day to celebrate, though unfortunately Chenyu couldn’t make it with some final program requirements.

Noah joined the lab back in 2021, during the pandemic, and has been a great source of continuity and support for our newer research coordinators–particularly through the transitions of the last year. Manizhe has been a behavioral neurology fellow training at the Memory and Aging Center, also with an ethics project selected for the American Academy of Neurology’s NITCEE (Neurologist-in-training Clinical Ethics Elective) program. And Chenyu has been a great asset to the lab, coming to us as one of the first students in UCSF’s new Master’s in Health Data Science program and bringing his quantitative skills to some of our tricky data. So excited to see what you all do next!

Continuing on the theme of international scientific travel, Pongpat Putthinun was at the AAIC Satellite Meeting in Lima, Peru, to present on strategies to improve knowledge about healty behaviors to prevent dementia in Thailand, with potential implications for other low- or middle-income countries. Congrats Pongpat!

We recently welcomed Juliana to Decision Lab and Chanel to UCSF Bioethics, and then very soon afterwards traveled together to exchange ideas and hopefully initaite new collaborations with scholars from around the world at the International Neuroethics Society meeting in Munich. As other exciting news, we will co-host next year’s Neuroethics 2026 meeting, which will be utilizing a new multi-hub global model with hubs in Palo Alto, Tuscany, and we hope a few other places. We are very excited about this new plan and look forward to providing more updates about this model soon.

2024 has been a year of growth and transformation for the lab. Several long-standing members who’ve helped to define the atmosphere and approach of the lab have moved on to exciting new roles and programs, and so we’ve welcomed nearly an entire new team of enthusiastic researchers bringing fresh perspectives and new ideas. Similarly, we’re wrapping up three large research projets that have been central to our lab’s work over the last few years, while starting up three new projects that will take us in new directions.

As part of this turnover, we had to bid a bitterweet goodbye to Clara, who is returning to Europe for another postdoc that will bring her back closer to family as she grows her own family. We are all so excited for her and Aurelien and look forward to many updates and photos. By sheer luck and coincidence, Rea turned out to be returning to Europe for her Winter Break on the exact same flight! So, we got to wish them off with a very American lunch of burgers and fries before sending them off to the airport. We’ve still got some exciting scientific projects to wrap up with Clara even after her postdoc is officially over, so there will be much more work and personal catching up over the next few months, but we’ll really miss having her in person (while also acknowledging that her family is very excited to have her back)!

For this year’s Decision Lab fall BBQ, we welcomed Marcus, Valerie, and Maya to the lab. Marcus is a new research coordinator with a background in neuroscience and bioethics. Valerie is a postdoc supporting our empirical ethics projects; she trained in cultural and medical anthropology at UC Berkeley. Meanwhile, Maya is currently the course assistant for UCSF’s human subjects Responsible Conduct of Research course, but will be joining the lab soon to think about neuroethics.

In addition, we were really happy to be joined by some Decision Lab alums, Cailin (now an attorney working on disability and health care advocacy), Madhu (now a pediatrics intern at Benioff Children’s Oakland), Celeste (now a clinical ethics fellow at Sutter), and Clayton, a data engineer for a neuroscience startup. So glad they could share ther experiences in lab with our new arrivals, and it was great to hear more about how their lives and careers have developed!