Chris Nicholson was a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience from 2021-2023. He graduated from Emory University with a B.S. in Quantitative Sciences in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology track and a Spanish minor. As a Simons Fellow, Chris was interested in the neural and genetic underpinnings that underlie the development of ASD. He investigated the dynamic topology of the developing infant brain in both typically-developing and autistic children as well as the brain structure, clinical phenotype, and genetic information of individuals with a 3q29 deletion. Chris is planning to pursue a doctoral degree in either Neuroscience or Clinical Psychology, with a focus on teaching and computationally robust research methods. Chris is currently traveling in Latin America. He plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology, focusing on personality pathology in adults.
Manash Sahoo was a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience from 2021-2023. He graduated from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2020 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology. As a Simons fellow, Manash’s interests lay in using advanced technology such as eye-tracking, fMRI, and other physiological sensors to identify relationships between neurological activity and behavior in ASD. In his future endeavors, Manash is currently a data scientist at the University of Huston under the guidance of Jermery Borjon, a past Simons Fellow in Computational Science.
Originally from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, Shivaang “Shiv” Chawla graduated from Emory University in 2020 with a B.S. in Quantitative Sciences with a concentration in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. During his undergraduate years, Shiv conducted research on the role of norepinephrine in Alzheimer’s Disease. He specifically studied the effects of prolonged DREADD-induced activation of the Locus Coeruleus (the main noradrenergic nucleus of the brain) on AD pathology in the hippocampus of aged transgenic rats. Prior to his senior year, Shiv’s interest in healthcare led him to an internship with the US Department of State where he worked with the health unit staff at the US Embassy in Helsinki and observed the Nordic healthcare system.
As a Simons Fellow, Shiv was most interested in eye-tracking and neuroimaging. His first-year project examined the effects of rhythm stemming from infant-directed singing on entrainment in typically developing and ASD infants. Shiv plans on pursuing an MD with the hopes to practice neurosurgery while also creating new technologies that increase the accessibility, affordability, and accuracy of medicine.
Originally from Nepal, Sanju Koirala graduated from Hamilton College, NY in 2019 with a B.A. in Neuroscience. As a recipient of the Emerson Research Grant at Hamilton, she investigated the availability and use of mental health resources after the earthquake in Nepal and conducted creative writing workshops as a psychological healing space for school-children. She also worked in the Hamilton Learning Lab where she researched the computational theories and neural basis of learning. Her undergraduate research culminated in a senior thesis examining multi-sensory integration in adults and 6-7-year-old children.
As a Simons fellow, Sanju used eye-tracking and neuroimaging data to examine the brain mechanisms underlying subjectively-perceived visual engagement and how such mechanisms differ between typically developing and ASD children. Additionally, she worked to streamline reflexive and social smile detection in infants by setting up an automated smile coding pipeline. Sanju is currently a graduate student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota.
Deniz Parmaksiz graduated from Emory University in 2019 with a B.S. in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and a minor in German Studies. Her involvement in undergraduate research began as a work-study assistant for a pediatric leukemia laboratory at Emory, but it wasn’t until her summer internship at NorthShore Hospital, where she investigated the interactions of the microbiome and neurodevelopment in mice models, that she started considering a career as a scientific investigator. Determined to pursue this line of research, Deniz joined and spent the latter half of her undergraduate career as a member of BUILD lab at Emory, where she was involved with the Baby Microbiome study, helping examine the impact of prenatal stress and environmental exposures on infant development across the first 18 months of life. Deniz had the opportunity to extend her experiences to a broader scope as part of a summer position at Center for Children’s Health, the Environment, the Microbiome, and Metabolomics (C-CHEM2), during which time she continued to work at BUILD lab while also rotating the other laboratories and research cores within the center to investigate the relationships between pre- and postnatal environment and the impacts thereof on brain development and microbiome.
As a Simons fellow, Deniz was involved with research studying the developmental trajectories of social visual engagement in ASD with a focus on machine learning and computational methods. Deniz is currently a student in the MD/PhD program at Pennsylvania State University.
Yixin (Stella) Yuan graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 with a B.S. in Neuroscience computational track and a minor in biological sciences. At CMU, she conducted research on epigenetic changes in the brain both during normal aging and in individuals with neurodegenerative disease. Her work was presented in an honors thesis on cell-type specific analysis of H3K27ac profile in aged individuals. Her interest in language acquisition also prompted her to conduct research on the neural correlates of speech segmentation at Tokyo Tech as her summer project.
Stella’s first-year project as a Simons fellow focused on predicting functional communication outcomes in ASD versus typically developing children based on the trajectory of fixation patterns collected from longitudinal eye tracking sessions. Some of her other projects included streamlining reflexive smile detection in infants by setting up an automated smile-coding pipeline, and performing a pilot study on the extent to which peripheral blood-samples are predictive of neuronal gene expression profiles using mice RNA-seq data. Stella is currently a graduate student in Neuroscience at the University of California San Diego.
Jack Olmstead graduated from Baylor University in 2017 with a B.S. in Neuroscience. His primary undergraduate research investigated the effects of early-life stress on cortico-amygdaloid circuitry and fear extinction in rats. He also did research at Yale School of Medicine performing neuroanatomical tracing techniques, and at Mount Sinai School of Medicine examining the morphological changes in rhesus monkey cortex as a result of learning. During the fellowship, Jack worked on projects examining differences in patterns of social visual engagement in toddlers with Williams syndrome compared to those with ASD. His second-year project used machine learning to improve eye-tracking data collection from neonates in order to extend the lab’s research into the first weeks of life. Jack is currently a data scientist at Enova International.
Andrew Kreuzman graduated with honors from Middlebury College in 2016 with a B.A. in Neuroscience and Spanish. His senior honors thesis investigated the genetic basis of conditioned fear in outbred mice as an endophenotype of human PTSD. He has also worked as a research assistant in the Society, Psychology, and Health Research Lab at Columbia University, and the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. As a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience, Andrew conducts eye-tracking research with infants, toddlers, and adolescents, merging his interest in computer science with his experience in neuroscience and research. His previous project focused on the development of the dynamic allocation of visual resources and the differences between children with varying levels of affectedness on the diagnostic spectrum. His current projects include investigating the visual scanning patterns of caregivers during live caregiver-infant interactions and creating stream-lined, user friendly pipelines for data management. After the fellowship, he continued his career development in computer programming and currently works as a solution architect.
Ella Swanson-Hysell graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 2015 with a B.A. in Computer Science/Mathematics and Psychology, and a minor in Mandarin Chinese. Her senior honors thesis examined the logarithmic-to-linear shift hypothesis in the numerical estimation skills of preschoolers. She has also worked as a research assistant at the University of Minnesota, in both a virtual reality research lab and the Math and Numeracy Lab at the Institute of Child Development. As a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience at the Marcus Autism Center, her projects included analyzing visual engagement with physical properties of social stimuli, calculating the conditional probabilities of fixation during dynamic visual scanning, and tracking the concordance of eye-tracking measures in twin pairs over time. After the fellowship, Ella worked as a research scientist at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development. She is currently a data scientist at EarliTec Diagnostics.
Abin Abraham graduated from the University of Michigan in 2013 with a B.S.E in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in Biochemistry. During his undergrad, he investigated potential biomarkers for Acute Kidney Injury in pediatric populations and explored inhibitors of T-cell activation. In addition, he also helped develop a novel high throughput and low crosstalk immunohistochemistry assay. For his senior capstone project, he designed a device for quantitative assessment of upper limb therapy. Abin earned an MD PhD from Vanderbilt University and is currently a resident in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Originally from Newton, MA, Carolyn Ranti graduated from Brown University in 2013 with a B.S. in Neuroscience. Her undergraduate thesis explored the timing of hierarchical decision-making using behavioral measures and a biologically plausible neural network model, and the research was recently published in Cognition (Ranti, Chatham, & Badre, 2015). As a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience, Carolyn's research assessed the use of eye-blinking as a measure of an individual's engagement with a visual stimulus. She also worked on software development for the lab and for various projects around the center. Carolyn is currently an Engineering Manager at Rune Labs, which focuses on building software to improve precision medicine in neuroscience.
Alyna Khan is originally from Philadelphia, PA and graduated from Brown University with an A.B in Classics and Biology with a focus on evolutionary biology. As an undergraduate, Alyna modeled linguistic patterns of phonemes and word order as a means to determine whether linguistic variation mirrors the genetic variation of that speaking population. As a Simons Fellow, she was involved in eye-tracking studies of infants, toddlers and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders, and explored predictive measures of gaze behavior. Currently she is living in Boston, MA and working as an Informatics Analyst at Foundation Medicine, Inc. Following the fellowship, Alyna spent time as an analyst for Foundation Medicine, as well as a research scientist at Appigen Solutions. She also conducts research at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, where she is currently a PhD candidate.
Sarah Glazer, originally from Dallas, TX, graduated from Columbia University with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering with a specialty in imaging. As an undergraduate, Sarah designed iPhone and iPad apps to be used to augment therapy aimed to teach emotion recognition to children with ASD. As a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience, she examined gaze behavior to understand the development of interactional synchrony between mothers and infants and its underlying neural mechanisms. Sarah completed an MD PhD at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and is currently an internal medicine resident at Oregon Health and Science University.
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Jeremy Borjon graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in Psychology and a certificate in Neuroscience in 2010. His senior thesis explored the extent to which the brain has evolved for social interaction and has demonstrated that perceived social cues, such as eye gaze, can influence basic sound perception. As a Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience from 2010-2012, he investigated the development of gaze behavior in humans and nonhuman primates and its implications for the perception of social scenes. Jeremy earned a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Jennings Xu graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in Biological Sciences in 2008 and was the Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience from 2008-2010. He has worked in various research fields, including molecular biology, genetics, physiology, and behavioral science. As an undergraduate, Jennings was published studying the sexual and group behaviors of mice ultrasound vocalizations in social interactions for his senior thesis. He is interested in identifying audiovisual signals that attract the attention of children with autism, as well as mapping early development characteristics that may help serve as clinically-relevant diagnostic indicators. Jennings is currently working as a Senior Director of Data Science for Johnson & Johnson.
David Lin was the Simons Fellow in Computational Neuroscience from 2006-2008. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Mathematics and Computational Sciences. As an undergraduate, he did research in a stem cell laboratory, investigating the distribution of stem cells within brain tumors. David is interested in applying various computational tools and methods to medicine. In his free time, David enjoys playing soccer and being outdoors. After the fellowship, David earned an MD from Harvard Medical School. He is currently an attending neurointensivist in Massachusetts General Hospital’s Neurosciences ICU. He also serves as the director of the Neurorecovery Clinic.