Principal Investigator
David Foster
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Summer 2019
Top Row: Bill, Charlie, David, Alice, John, Matt.
Bottom row: Althea, Shuo, Archit, Caitlin.
Postdoctoral Scholars
Matt Kleinman
Matt has been in the Foster lab since 2015, working on understanding replay formation and function by investigating the role dopaminergic inputs to hippocampus have in generating and biasing sequences. He received his PhD in Neurobiology from Yale University in 2015, where he worked with Dr. Daeyeol Lee on the behavioral characteristics and neural correlates of temporal perception and decision making in non-human primates. Earlier, he earned his BS in psychology from the University of Arizona in 2009, completing thesis work in the lab of Dr. Alan Sanfey on human decision making in simple economic games.
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John Widloski
John joined the lab in 2015 and is studying how replay sequences respond to changing spatial contingencies in dynamic environments. John received his PhD in Physics from the University of Austin, Texas in 2015, working primarily on grid cell continuous attractor models (supervised by Ila Fiete). Prior to this, he spent a number of years working within the field of fluid dynamics, studying Laplacian growth (with Harry Swinney, Michael Marder, and Mark Mineev-Weinstein) and microfluidic mixing (with Roman Grigoriev and Dmitri Vainchtein).
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Caitlin Mallory
Caitlin received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University in 2018, where she worked with Dr. Lisa Giocomo. Her thesis work uncovered how the spatial scale of entorhinal grid cells contributes to the scale and stability of CA1 place fields. Prior to joining Lisa’s lab, Caitlin earned a BS in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan, where she worked with Dr. Martin Sarter to uncover the role of prefrontal acetylcholine in sustained attention. In the Foster lab, Caitlin is interested in understanding how replay events are mechanistically generated.
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Graduate Students
Archit Gupta
Archit joined the lab in May 2018. After receiving a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he joined the PhD program in EECS at Berkeley. Currently he is studying the role of Sharp-Wave ripples and Replays in online learning and planning. Prior to joining the lab, he worked on modeling and simulation of semiconductor device models for his Masters thesis with Dr. Jaijeet Roychowdhury at Berkeley.
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Bill Croughan
Bill is working on online detection of replay events. He has a background in math and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and joined the Neuroscience program at Cal in 2016. His work includes developing tools for online analysis of electrophysiology data, and designing behavioral experiments to leverage these tools. He will also be looking into designing high-throughput electrophysiology methods for the lab.
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Alumni
Alice Berners-Lee, PhD student and postdoctoral scholar
Alice got her BS in Neural Science at NYU, working with Dr. Lila Davachi. She then worked as a research technician in the labs of Dr. Tom Carew, Dr. André Fenton and Dr. Adam Carter. She is studying how hippocampal sequences engage the medial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum as well as how replay changes with experience. Alice received her PhD in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University in 2020 and continued as a postdoctoral scholar in the lab. She is currently a postdoc in the lab of Venkatesh Murthy at Harvard University.
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Website
Althea Cavanaugh, PhD Student
Althea is currently working as a Political Technology Specialist at DigiDems.
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Charlie Walters, Lab technician & Lab manager
Charlie joined the Foster lab to design and build 256-channel tetrode microdrives after graduating from UC Berkeley in 2017 with a BA in Molecular and Cell Biology. Charlie joined the Johns Hopkins Neuroscience PhD program in Fall 2019.
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Dr. Shuo Chen, postdoctoral scholar
Dr. Heydar Davoudi, PhD student and postdoctoral scholar
Heydar received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2017 in the Foster lab where he integrated in vivo electrophysiology and optogenetics to uncover the contribution of hippocampal area CA3 to the formation of CA1 place cell responses in freely moving rodents. He then did a postdoc in the Foster lab at UC Berkeley studying mechanisms for generation of hippocampal neural ensemble activities such as replay and theta sequences.
Heydar is currently a Postdoctoral scholar in the Dombeck lab at Northwestern University, http://www.dombecklab.org/research/
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Dr. Christine Boone, MD/PhD student
Christine is currently a Resident Physician, Integrated Interventional Radiology/Diagnostic Radiology Residency, T32 Research Track at UCSD.
Dr. Ellen Ambrose, PhD student
Ellen is currently a Senior Data Scientist at Protenus.
Dr. Ting Feng, PhD student
Ting is currently a scientist in Philips Research North America, working on predictive algorithms for clinical decision support utilizing electronic health records and waveform data.
Dr. Xiao-Jing Wu, PhD student
Xiao-Jing is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the NYU Langone Medical Center.
Dr. Delia Silva, PhD student
Delia is currently an Engagement Manager at L.E.K. Life Sciences
Dr. Cara Altimus, postdoctoral scholar
Cara is currently an Associate Director at Center for Strategic Philanthropy, Milken Institute
Dr. Brad Pfeiffer, postdoctoral scholar
Brad is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Southwestern Medical Foundation Endowed Scholar in Biomedical Research.
https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/labs/pfeiffer/lab-members/
https://profiles.utsouthwestern.edu/profile/55498/brad-pfeiffer.html
Jon Harrold, lab technician
Jon is currently at ACUC at Johns Hopkins University
Fall 2017
Top Row: John, Alice, Bill, Heydar.
Bottom Row: Matt, Althea, Charlie, David.
2015
Heydar, Christine, Ellen, Cara, David, Alice, Ting, Jon
