She Runs the Lab

Chiye Aoki majored in biology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She entered the world of neuroscience during those years by participating in research that monitored brain activities of animals undergoing the natural transition from wakefulness to REM sleep to answer the question: Why do we need to sleep?

Summer Ash is the Director of Outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy. Ash is also a freelance science writer and communicator. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Now.Space, Scientific American, Slate, and Nautilus.

Shara Bailey is an associate professor in the Center for the Study of Human Origins, in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. Bailey’s research focuses on answering questions about human evolution from a dental perspective.

Daniela Buccella is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at New York University. Born and raised in Venezuela, she received her B.S. in Chemistry in 2002 from Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, and started research as an undergraduate in the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research under the supervision of Professor Roberto Sánchez-Delgado.

Annalisa Calo has a degree in Chemistry and a master in Photochemistry and Chemistry of Materials, based in the design of molecules and materials with new properties and on their characterization by means of high-resolution techniques from the University of Bologna, Italy.

Jane M. Carlton is director of the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and a biology professor at New York University. She has spent the past 20 years on the faculty of several scientific institutions in the United States, including the genome sequencing center founded by J. Craig Venter.

Lara K. Mahal is an associate professor of chemistry at New York University. She earned her B.A. at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. Mahal was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctral Fellow from 2000-2003 at Sloan-Kettering Institute before starting her first independent position at the University of Texas in Austin.

Christine Vogel originally trained as a biochemist in Germany, but moved to Cambridge, England, to obtain her PhD in computational and structural biology with Dr. Cyrus Chothia and Dr. Sarah Teichmann at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology.

Jill Bargonetti, a renowned cancer researcher, earned her B.A. at SUNY College at Purchase and her Ph.D. at New York University and did postdoctorate work at Columbia University. She serves as chair of the molecular, cellular, and development subprogram in the Ph.D. Program in Biology at the Graduate Center and as professor of biological sciences at Hunter College.

Virginia W. Cornish graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in Biochemistry in 1991, where she did undergraduate research with Professor Ronald Breslow. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry with Professor Peter Schultz at the University of California at Berkeley and then was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biology Department at M.I.T. under the guidance of Professor Robert Sauer.

Angelique Corthals is a biomedical/forensic anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of Oxford. Her work has focused on biomedical research, including the study of the ecology of infectious diseases and auto-immune diseases, as well as forensic anthropology in South America and the Middle East.

Mandë Holford is as an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medical College.

Frida E. Kleiman is a chemistry professor at Hunter College. Kleiman received her M.S. and her PhD at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. She received her Postdoc at Columbia University in New York.

Elisa Riedo, PhD joined the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center’s Nanoscience Initiative in August 2015. She completed both her B.S. and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Milan and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Ecole Polytechnic Federale Lusanne in Switzerland.

Linda C. Rourke is a board certified criminalist and a life-long science geek. She studied biochemistry in college but hadn’t found her career passion until she learned about forensic science.

Daphna Shohamy, PhD is a neuroscientist and a professor in the department of Psychology and the Zuckerman Mind, Brain, Behavior Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Shohamy’s research aims to understand the neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms underlying learning, memory, and decision making.

Nim Tottenham, PhD is an associate professor of Psychology at Columbia University and director of the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. Her research examines brain development underlying emotional behavior in humans.