team

I see myself as having three main jobs, which (I hope) inform one another. I am a behavioral neurologist, and my clinical practice focuses on Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, and other cognitive disorders of aging. I am also a cognitive neuroscientist, applying observations from clinic to investigate why patients like mine are vulnerable to making bad decisions. Third, I am a neuroethicist, working alongside other clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to address the ethical and social implications of changes in decision-making due to altered brain function.

I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. During medical school here at UCSF, I took a leave to pursue a PhD in philosophy at NYU, where I studied with Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit. After residency training in neurology back at UCSF, I did a combined fellowship in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging with Mark D’Esposito at UC Berkeley and in behavioral neurology here at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

Alongside my clinical and research work, I am the Interim Director of UCSF Bioethics, a member of the UCSF Department of Neurology Diversity Committee and a member of the the UCSF Medical Center Ethics Committee. Nationally, I serve on the Neuroethics Working Group of the National Institutes of Health BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Multi-Council Working Group, and the American Academy of Neurology’s Ethics, Law and Humanities Committee.

I am a Sociologist in the UCSF Department of Neurology Memory and Aging Center, where my research aims to elucidate the ethical concerns in existing clinical applications of closed-loop neuromodulation in epilepsy as well as movement and mood disorders. I am also part of UCSF’s Institute for Health Policy Studies and its newly established Medical Cultures Lab, a collaborative of social scientists working on methods innovations and the culture of medicine.

I received my PhD and Master of Philosophy degrees in sociology from the University of Cambridge. During my doctoral studies I held a Research Fellowship at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research and was a member of its Long-term Care and Dementia group. I then conducted postdoctoral research at the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute of the University of Zurich and for the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich. Thereafter, I taught as student supervisor at the University of Cambridge for the “Introduction to Sociology:Modern Societies I” and the paper “Social Context of Health and Illness” and was a visiting fellow at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford.

I am particularly interested in how medical knowledge and care practices are interpreted differently in distinct cultural settings. Beyond these specific research domains, I am also interested in aging studies, the sociology of health and illness, comparative ethnographic research, and qualitative research methodologies.

Movements are files of a person’s life, learned, reproduced, and altered as needed. There are external movements, those that make us act on objects and internal movements, an energy that we use in space and time. My interest in the body as a ‘depository of human expressiveness’ led me to a degree in Psychomotor Therapy with a Master’s specialization in old age and mental health (University of Lisbon). An enriching experience with an aging population triggered my interest in old age, and I realized how much I still had to learn about the biological and physiological mechanisms of aging and the disruptions that lead to age-related diseases.

My Master in Integrative Biology and Physiology, with specialization in Cognitive Neurosciences (Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris), provided me with the basis for understanding brain aging mechanisms. My enthusiasm in this domain propelled me to pursue a PhD in Cognitive Neurosciences (Sorbonne University) at the Paris Brain Institute, working in the field of language in neurodegenerative diseases and the use of transcranial stimulation as a possible therapeutic approach. As movements, each word also has a biography that is related to the biography of the person using it. Understanding how one’s language abilities are affected during a disease process is another piece in the complex domain of neurodegeneration and its consequences on one’s identity.

I am interested in understanding how an individual responds to aging in different spheres of life and how the identification of altered mechanisms in pathological aging can help prevent early cognitive and functional decline. By joining the Decision Lab at the Memory and Aging Center, I am excited to explore how the process of decision-making is affected and which are the neural basis that subtends decision-making alterations.

Having lived for extended periods in Thailand, Japan, and the United States, I gained insight into the diverse healthcare practices and attitudes toward dementia and the disparate resources for diagnosis, treatment and care across borders and demographic groups. I want to use my background in health economics and the expertise I acquire at UCSF Memory and Aging Center to contribute to the advancement of brain health equity through enhanced public health programs that can provide global benefits.

I earned my PhD in Health Economics from Hiroshima University and a master’s degree in Human Resource Development from Waseda University in Tokyo. My doctoral research in Dr. Yoshihiko Kadoya’s lab focused on identifying key determinants that exposed populations in different countries to increased health risks thereby enabling timely intervention measures.

Joining Decision Lab under Dr. Winston Chiong is an exciting opportunity. I am currently working on a project aimed at understanding how genetic predispositions to frontotemporal dementia influence decision-making in the pre-symptomatic phase. Through neuroeconomic methods, the research seeks to identify incidents of early impaired judgment that could lead to intervention strategies to decelerate the onset of frontotemporal dementia.

Outside of work, my interests include attending symphonic concerts, visiting museums, keeping fit at the gym, kayaking, and exploring new places.

The Decision Lab is the perfect home for my interdisciplinary interests. I received my undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I conducted research on Alzheimer’s disease. While there I also took several philosophy courses, which introduced me to the field of bioethics. I became so enamored with the subject that I went to study for a Master’s in Bioethics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I had the opportunity to conduct work with a lab studying deep brain stimulation as a potential therapy for treatment resistant depression. My thesis project analyzed patient perspectives to respond to the ethical concerns and implications of DBS for depression, particularly as it relates to themes of identity.

My experience in neuroethics and neurotechnology led me to UCSF and the Decision Lab, where I coordinate the lab’s day to day activities and work as a research coordinator for the Neuroethics in Novel Neurotechnologies study. The project involves observing and interviewing patients, caregivers, and providers in order to identify and respond to concerns regarding the ethics of closed-loop deep brain stimulation. I see value in the perspectives that these narratives can provide as we develop best practices for novel neurotechnologies. More broadly, however, I am also curious as to how such advancements in therapeutic technologies can challenge our society’s perception of itself and its values. Beyond this project, I assist the management of UCSF Bioethics, particularly the organization of our monthly clinical ethics journal clubs. I also organized the Neuroethics Seminar, a twice-monthly interdisciplinary discussion on ethics-related questions that arise from neuroscience research and clinical neurology practice.

In my free time, I enjoy keeping up to date with the newest films and shows, trying to find the best bites in San Francisco, and pretending that I am half as good at rock climbing as the rest of the SF population.

I am transitioning from a former career as a Ballet dancer to a field of medicine, science, and groundbreaking clinical research. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Performing Arts Degree in the Liberal Education for Arts Professionals program at Saint Mary’s College of California. I am also earning an Associate’s degree in the field of Biological Sciences at Canada College. Among several extracurricular activities, I also enjoyed being a part of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society and the Alpha Gamma Sigma Honor Society.

While focusing on my artistry as a ballerina, I enjoyed traveling the world and experiencing unique cultures. In my dance career, I was awarded the Princess Grace Award, a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Performing Arts Medal, and the Chris Hellman Award, among other newspaper and magazine features. While I appreciate and value my time in the dance world, I always knew that I would like to go into medicine one day.

I discovered my passion for research during my time as an NIH researcher in the Bridges to Baccalaureate Program through SF State University. In this program, I acquired laboratory skills and presented on various research projects. I enjoy volunteering at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and at Shanti Project, where I was grateful to be named the Spotlight Volunteer in Shanti’s Spring 2019 Newsletter. I am thrilled to provide emotional support and practical assistance for both children in the hospital and assisting aging adults with disabilities in Shanti.

Compassion for our elderly with dementia is a value that is essential in society, so I am incredibly interested in researching and assisting with projects that enhance their quality of life. This is one of many reasons I believe in and value the research at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and why I’m excited about the work that I am doing as a member of the Decision lab, specifically on the Genes, Brains and Decisions Project. The insightful knowledge, experience, and abilities I will learn while working at UCSF’s world-class facility will better prepare me for my future as a physician and researcher.

In my spare time, I enjoy swimming, hiking, reading, and Pilates.

I am a recent UC Berkeley graduate who majored in Psychology and minored in Public Policy.

At Berkeley, I was a psychology peer advisor, marketing research ntern, research assistant, and library circulation assistant. These positions allowed me to meet and assist many people from diverse backgrounds, and I’m excited to continue this practice at the Decision Lab and UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

My research interest sparked when I became a research assistant at the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, where I researched awe and psychophysiology. I loved working with participants, brainstorming new techniques, and analyzing the results. My time in this lab has taught me valuable lifelong skills and has reiterated that I want to impact and help others through research.

After taking coursework in Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, I was eager to learn more about mental and aging disorders, which ultimately led me to the Decision Lab. Studying case studies of patients with dementia emphasized how much is still unknown. The complexity and debilitating effects of aging disorders have motivated me to work with this clinical population. I am grateful to be a part of the Decision Lab, where I have the opportunity to discover unanswered questions about dementia and fundamentally improve care for patients from all backgrounds.

I enjoy playing basketball, playing video games, hiking, and watching anime in my free time.

I am a psychologist (BA. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) and mindfulness facilitator (UCSD Center for Mindfulness), with graduate studies in Neural and Behavioral sciences (MSc. University of Tuebingen-International Max Planck Research School, Germany). The UCSF Memory and Aging Center is the perfect home hosting my professional aspirations, since a lot of my work is interdisciplinary.

Being part of both the Decision and Rankin Lab, has accordingly provided me the opportunity to be involved in a variety of projects concerning decision making and socioemotional function. More specifically, my main research areas include 1. investigating social cognition (e.g., moral reasoning) in bvFTD patients and healthy older adults, and 2. examining the effect of mindfulness-based interventions in the context of dementia care.

In my free time I enjoy surfing, hiking and travelling.

As an undergraduate, I attended UC Berkeley, where I developed a fascination for the brain and behavior, prompting me to pursue a degree in neurobiology. At Berkeley, I studied in the lab of Dr. Linda Wilbrecht where I completed an honors thesis investigating adolescent exploration, risk-taking, and reward-seeking behaviors and their neurophysiological correlates. During this time, I developed a passion for research, particularly reward processing and decision making, and how the dysfunction of these processes is relevant to disease and addiction.

Experiences outside of academics have been instrumental in helping to refine my interests. For example, I work as a crisis counselor, assisting folks in getting through challenging moments in their lives. I also volunteered at the Alzheimer’s Services of the East Bay. I found interacting with and working to improve the quality of life for older individuals of all backgrounds to be critical and fulfilling, and I resolved to fuse this meaningful work with my passion for research. I became particularly interested in studying dementia, as this topic is personal to me, and there is still so much to understand about different dementias.

I am extremely excited to be working as a clinical research coordinator in both the Decision Lab and the lab of Dr. David Perry. The research conducted by these groups integrates my nterests in decision making, reward processing, and neurodegenerative disease and allows me to contribute to research that will improve the diagnostic accuracy of dementia and allow for effective treatment. I look forward to learning more about this complex disease and hope our work can help patients and their loved ones to cope with its often debilitating effects. In my spare time, I enjoy surfing, playing basketball, playing soccer, running and music.

I have a longstanding interest in improving healthcare access and equity in healthcare. After I finished each step of my medical training in Iran, I worked in an underserved area of my country and learned about various cultures, dialects and languages as well as various belief systems. Moving to the US and living in Boston was another exceptional experience. These experiences made me curious about the neurobiological basis of ethics as well as its cultural relevance.

Brain function was one of the most fascinating parts of medicine for me and while training in neurology, I realized that I am especially interested in cognitive function including language and behavior. Ethical aspects of dementia as a disease and observation of its burden on the patients and their caregivers have been also an important motivation for me to pursue further training and research efforts in the field of neuroethics with hopes to help providing a more equitable care around the world by raising awareness about current disparities and gaps in health literacy and healthcare access.

I love poetry, literature and music. They help me enjoy and make sense of our complex world. I spend my spare time with them, friends, family, or nature! I also love art museums!

I am a medical student at the University of Califonria, San Francisco. After working at Dreem Health, a neurotech company expanding access to sleep care, I was eager to join the Decision Lab and understand public reception to neuro innovation. My contributions to our Neuroethics Survey Project seek to outline how race, ethnicty, and rurality influence beliefs about therapeutic implanated neural devices. Previously, I’ve explored social cognition, dementia, and I hope to pursue further research in neural interfaces at UCSF.

I recieved my B.A. in Neuroscience with a minor in Social Anthropology from Harvard Univeristy. Determined to bridge the slow, yet insightful practices of research with the rapid, socially impactful capital of investing, I interned at BrainMind, a community of neuroscientists, investors, philathropists, and entrepreneurs looking to bring socially-impactful neuro innovatios to market, during college. While at BrainMind, I devoted my time to developing its flagship, Neuroethics Advisory Commitee. Convening policymakers, academics, entrepreneurs, and investors we sought to challenge this multidisplincary group to rethink how we sustainably integrate ethics into neuro innovation. Outside of neurotech, ethics, and medicine, I enjoy working out, and playing guitar and basketball.

I’m a neuroscientist and postdoctoral scholar in the UCSF Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Center studying motivation in Parkinson’s disease with Drs. Simon Little and Phil Starr and neuroethics here in the Decision Lab.

In the Little and Starr Labs, our group aims to treat motor and nonmotor (e.g., sleep, cognition, emotion) deficits in patients with Parkinson’s disease using neurosurgically implanted deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices. My main research project focuses on understanding apathy and impulsivity symptoms in these patients by (1) measuring goal-directed and habitual decision making with computational reinforcement learning models; (2) mapping these cognitive processes to neural activity using chronic invasive brain recordings; and (3) modulating these neural circuits using dopaminergic medications and DBS.

In the Decision Lab, I’m studying bioethics to better understand the ethical, legal, and social implications of neurotechnology. For example, if brain stimulation can alter motivation or other aspects of one’s personality and identity, how should we deploy and regulate these treatments? I hope that combining neuroethics with my basic and clinical neuroscience research will help inform guidelines for the responsible use of neurotechnology.

I graduated in 2012 from Hendrix College with a BA in Neuroscience before spending two years as a postbaccalaureate researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health working on functional MRI methods. In 2021, I graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in Neuroscience in which I studied cognitive control using intracranial brain recordings from epilepsy patients. Outside of the lab, I enjoy playing ultimate frisbee, hiking, kayaking, and camping.

As a research and compliance analyst at the UCSF Institutional Review Board and concurrent graduate student at Columbia in Bioethics, my mission is to protect the rights and welfare of human participants. My perspective merges “how to” with “should we” – through the translation of regulatory science and embodiment of the Belmont Principles. Within the UCSF IRB, my work is aimed at understanding and providing guidance on the policies that influence clinical research locally, nationally, and internationally.

I hold an interdisciplinary degree in Biology, Psychology, and Sociology from San Diego State University, where my thesis analyzed the neurobiological effects of the practice of yoga. This fusion of fascination within neurobiology, technology, and regulatory expertise inspired my current research work in the ethical challenges of neurotechnologies.

Currently, I am on the leadership team of the Science Policy Group at UCSF, a member of the Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), National Science Policy Network (NSPN), International Neuroethics Society (INS), and California Life Science Association (CLSA).

In my free time I like to travel, practice yoga, read, and visit modern art museums.

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Dr. Edward Chang, situated within the department of Neurological Surgery and the Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF. I have a B.A. in Physics with a Music minor from UC Berkeley, and I completed my PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Sydney. My basic research interests are in understanding the neural circuitry underlying our experience of music. To investigate this, I use a combination of intracranial and non-invasive approaches to measure human brain activity during music listening. I then apply computational modeling techniques to this activity to characterize how neurons encode relevant perceptual, cognitive, and emotional parameters of music, and the neural specializations that exist for music versus other auditory domains such as speech.

I’m also studying neuroethics with Dr. Winston Chiong in the Decision Lab at UCSF to better understand the broader societal implications of neuroscientific research. I’m interested in determining how research translates into public understanding and how to promote increased collaboration between neuroscientists, neuroethicists, and the public to effectively comprehend and communicate the risks and benefits associated with advances in our understanding of the human brain. Outside of work, I play and consume music, I ride my bike in the East Bay hills, and I’m constantly on the lookout for the best swimming spot in the Bay or Pacific Ocean.