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We finally got back to our Tuesday lab lunch! Great to hang out one more time with Emily, and to meet Noah for the first time in person. Hoping to return to more lab in-person routines in the coming months!

Our biggest in-person gathering in over a year! We were able to see most of those leaving for their following chapters; although, as we’ve seen with previous alumni, we hopefully won’t get much of a chance to miss them. Sang will be the first to leave us for UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, followed by Cailin, who’s going off to UC Davis’ School of Law. Emily will be traveling the furthest from us, returning to her home state’s Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in Arizona. Loren graduated from the University of San Francisco’s nursing program and will be the last to leave this cycle upon entering the workforce. We’re all so proud of what this group contributed during their time in the lab, and we know their future schools and employers are fortunate to have such bright, compassionate, and uniquely remarkable people joining them.

It was great to gather with the Decision Lab, the Medical Cultures Lab, and so many Decision Lab alums for an online chocolate tasting hosted by Theo Chocolates. We all had a chance to enjoy one another’s company, make jokes on the chat, learn a little bit about chocolate fermentation and tempering, and taste a lot of delicious chocolate!

It’s been a very long time coming, and honestly I wasn’t sure what to mark as our date for welcoming Clara Sanches to the lab. Let’s see–she first gave a presentation to our lab on her prior work back in March 2020, and we originally offered her a postdoc in April 2020 to begin September 2020. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic her embassy interview kept getting postponed, and honestly we started to worry about whether her visa would ever come through! With lots of wonderful help and flexibility from the UCSF International Students and Scholars Office and the Office for Postdoctoral Scholars, we were able to set up a remote-work position in December 2020 while waiting for her interview, and she was finally able to come to San Francisco in February 2021 (though, of course, we’re all still working remotely).

Clara joins us from Portugal via the ICM-Pitié Salpêtrière in Paris (the birthplace of neurology), where she did her PhD and initial postdoc with Marc Teichmann and Antoni Valero-Cabre. She brings tremendous experience in working with patients with rare neurodegenerative conditions, including advanced research on noninvasive brain stimulation in patients with progressive supranuclear palsy, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, and primary progressive aphasia. She has just published a comprehensive review of noninvasive brain stimulation in neurodegeneration informed by her work. Here at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center she’ll be working on our Genes, Brains and Decisions and Decision-Making in Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias projects, developing new skills in functional neuroimaging analysis. We are so glad to have her and grateful for her patience and perseverance!

It’s that time of year again! This send-off was a little more bitter than sweet because of physical distancing. Still, we couldn’t be more excited to see what psychological insights Heather will contribute to UCSD’s Rady School of Management, and how Emory’s School of Medicine will benefit having Madhu’s caring intellect (we assume they’ll probably have more compost bins). We’re hoping to drag you to our virtual game nights on occasion, but that won’t prevent us from missing everything you both bring to the lab.

I was pleased and proud to join the first-ever and possibly-last UCSF School of Medicine Virtual Commencement Ceremony to celebrate the pioneering class of 2020, especially Decision Lab alumni Alex Beagle, (the first Decision Lab research coordinator, prior to med school), Julia Heunis (the first Care Ecosystem CTN, prior to med school), and Neil Vaishnav (current Decision Lab advanced degree record-holder). While I think we all were sad not to be able to gather together, the ceremony was also the most meaningful I can remember. Every day we are now reminded of the importance of compassionate, evidence-informed and patient-centered care, and we know that Alex, Julia, Neil and their classmates will soon be doing some of the very most important work in the midst of this historic pandemic.