Potential Mentors

For the MARC program, you will have the opportunity to interact with multiple potential faculty mentors during your first semester in the program. You do not have to choose a faculty mentor when you apply. However, you should at least make sure that there is at least one individual on the list below that you would be excited about potentially working with.

Name	Department	Research Focus
Dr. Chandramallika Basak	Department of Psychology	Attentional control and working memory, cognitive training strategies, neural and cognitive predictors of complex skill acquisition, and aging
Dr. Michael Burton	Department of Neuroscience	How the immune and nervous systems communicate to elicit various behaviors: An emphasis on pain, depression, and metabolism
Dr. Nicole De Nisco	Department of Bioengineering	Host-pathogen-microbiome interactions that underlie recurrent urinary tract infection (UTI) leveraging advanced imaging, whole genome metagenomic, and mass spectrometry-based metabolomic techniques
Dr. Yichen Ding	Department of Bioengineering	Optical microscopy; image segmentation; interactive visualization; myocardial deformation
Dr. Dave Dingal	Department of Bioengineering	Cell biophysics, molecular biology, and synthetic biology
Dr. Greg Dussor	Department of Neuroscience	Migraine pathophysiology using a variety of preclinical behavioral, electrophysiological, and biochemical models
Dr. Crystal Engineer	Department of Neuroscience	Auditory processing in neurodevelopmental disorders and plasticity-based therapies to improve neural responses and behavioral outcomes
Dr. Baowei Fei	Department of Bioengineering	Development and application of Quantitative Imaging technologies
Dr. Francesca Filbey	Department of Psychology	Addiction as a model to understand reward system dysfunction in humans using multimodal brain imaging techniques
Dr. Zirong Gu	Department of Neuroscience	Exploring how basal ganglia outputs interact with other brain regions to select, initiate, and execute motivated behavior in both health and disease
Dr. Seth Hays	Department of Bioengineering	Enhancing neuroplasticity through vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) to improve recovery in models of motor dysfunction
Dr. Caroline Jones	Department of Bioengineering	Immunoengineering, Sepsis, Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Inflammation, Lab-on-a-chip technology, Biosensors, Host-pathogen interactions
Dr. Lin Jia	Department of Biological Sciences	Identify pathways that contribute to the development of advanced liver damage (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and associated metabolic disorders
Dr. Kristen Kennedy	Department of Psychology	Normal and pathological (AD) aging of brain and cognition; environmental/genetic/health/lifestyle modifiers; MRI brain function-structure association
Dr. Michael Kilgard	Department of Neuroscience	Vagus nerve stimulation to enhance plasticity and rehabilitation in stroke, tinnitus, spinal cord injury, neuropathy, and PTSD
Dr. Tae Kim	Department of Biological Sciences	Understanding nuclear processes and mechanisms that segregate, fold and unfold chromosome fibers and disease causing changes that disrupt normal location, arrangement and interpretation of the human genome
Dr. Benedict Kolber	Department of Neuroscience	Pain with an emphasis on stress adaptation, depression, visceral organs, and drug discovery (analgesics, overdose antidotes, assay development)
Dr. Sven Kroener	Department of Neuroscience	How the prefrontal cortex is altered in drug addiction
Dr. Christa McIntyre	Department of Neuroscience	Neural mechanisms of stress effects on memory and extinction of conditioned fear
Dr. Faruck Morcos	Department of Biological Sciences	Development and application of methods to extract biological information from sequence and genomic data and its applications to understand and fight disease
Dr. Girgis Obaid	Department of Bioengineering	Developing light-activated nanoparticles as cancer therapeutics using molecular imaging as an informant for their intelligent engineering
Dr. Alice O’Toole	Department of Psychology	Face recognition by humans and machines; neural processing of faces and bodies
Dr. Kelli Palmer	Department of Biological Sciences	Antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria
Dr. Joe Pancrazio	Department of Bioengineering	Development and demonstration of innovative materials that either enhance the coupling with neuronal tissue, show enhanced reliability, and/or reduce the deleterious effects on surrounding biotic environment
Dr. Amy Pinkham	Department of Psychology	Identify mechanisms of social dysfunction in schizophrenia and related mental illnesses in order to improve outcomes
Dr. Ted Price	Department of Neuroscience	Molecular characterization of human pain-sensing neurons; chronic pain mechanisms; development of novel pain therapeutics
Dr. Zhenpeng Qin	Department of Mechanical Engineering	Interdisciplinary research at the intersection of nanomaterials, photonics, neurosciences, and rapid diagnostics
Dr. Millie Rincon Cortes	Department of Neuroscience	Normative and stress-induced plasticity of reward and mesolimbic dopamine function, emphasis on early development and the postpartum period
Dr. Karen Rodrigue	Department of Psychology	Understanding the contributions of vascular health to normal and pathological aging is fundamentally important given both the prevalence of vascular risk in the aging population and its amenability to prevention and treatment
Dr. Filippo Romiti	Department of Chemistry	Building high-impact, novel, and practical chemical transformations and creative synthesis strategies that allow rapid access to complex natural products with potential application in treating human diseases
Dr. Katelyn Sadler	Department of Neuroscience	Gut-brain circuits in chronic pain conditions; central nervous system modulation of sickle cell disease pain
Dr. David Schmidtke	Department of Bioengineering	Fabrication of novel materials & devices (e.g. biosensors, microfluidics) for biological and medical applications
Dr. Kendra Seaman	Department of Psychology	Using behavioral, modeling, and neuroimaging techniques to understand motivation and decision making across adult development
Dr. Pumpki Lei Su	Department of Psychology	Studying parent-child interaction and language development in autistic children and bilingual children using observational and experimental methods *Not accepting new students this semester
Dr. Yonas Tadesse	Department of Mechanical Engineering	Humanoid robotics, emerging applications of smart materials, sensors, and actuators, mechatronic system, multimodal energy harvesting, modeling, controls and biomimetics
Dr. Diana Tavares Ferreira	Department of Neuroscience	Cellular and molecular mechanisms of axonal integrity; studying the role of RNA transport and non-coding RNAs in neuropathies and neurodegenerative diseases using multi-omics and computational approaches *Not accepting new students this semester
Dr. Gagan Wig	Department of Psychology	Brain network connectivity, healthy and pathological aging, brain health disparities across the lifespan
Dr. Jie Zheng	Department of Chemistry	Investigating fundamental structure-property relationships of nanomaterials at bulk and single molecular level and exploring their applications in bioimaging, catalysis and energy conversion