our team

Graduate Student

Wenxuan (Skylar) Fang is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. She spent the first two years of her undergraduate study at Zhejiang University and transferred to Cornell University, majoring in Biological Sciences and Biometry & Statistics. During her junior and senior years, she conducted research with Dr. Andrew Bass at Cornell, studying the neural mechanisms of the selection and generation of context-appropriate vocalizations of the plainfin midshipman and also the aggression and vocalization of Danionella dracula, which could be a promising vertebrate brain model. Skylar is interested in system and computational neuroscience in general and has been working on the Dome project concerning the flexible representation of the hippocampal formation.

Graduate Student

Afsoon Gharib Mombeini is a PhD student in the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. Her bachelor’s degree is in Mechanical Engineering. She drafted her thesis as a survey on Cybernetics which familiarized her with novel approaches to study and understand complex biological systems, specifically the nervous system. This motivated her to pursue a multidisciplinary major, so she studied Biomedical Engineering for her master’s degree. Through her master’s studies she gained experience in neuroscience, Python programming, and signal processing which helps her to productively contribute to the lab. She is interested in working on the intersection of engineering and neuroscience. She has been working on the maze project which aims to compare navigation algorithms that rats, humans, and robots employ.

Graduate Student

Gelareh is a Master’s student co-supervised by Dr. Jason Snyder, and starting a project on the effects of neurogenesis. She completed her bachelors of Behavioral Neuroscience at SFU in December 2021 . She has previous experience in preclinical research and circadian rhythms research. Her research interest lies in the areas of neurological disorders, neural oscillations, neural prosthesis and medical device design. She joined the NC4 lab in January 2021 as a part time research assistant working on the animal pilot project.

Graduate Student

Annie Kim is a MSc student in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience. She completed her Honours Bachelor’s of Science degree at the University of Toronto with a double major in Neuroscience and Psychology. During her time at UofT she researched the effects of sleep on memory consolidation in the Barense Memory and Perception Lab. Here, she developed an interest in the cognitive impairments that arise due to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). For her master’s degree, Annie will be working on the Maze project to investigate changes in the cognitive map and spatial navigation of healthy and AD-model rodents.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Adam Ward Lester is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He previously did a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Carol A Barnes at the University of Arizona, where he studied neurophysiological and behavioral age-related changes in cue-based navigation. He earned his BA in philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Arizona

Lab Manager

Isaac completed his Bachelor’s of Science in Behavioural Neuroscience and Biology here at UBC. Since then, he has been working in medical and technological research with various organizations and is currently completing his graduate certificate as an orientation and mobility specialist part-time. At the lab, he hopes to use his knowledge of human research to implement new studies. Please reach out to Isaac at isaac.morgan@ubc.ca for operational information regarding the lab, or prospective work openings.

Research Technician

Rick completed his B.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Lethbridge. His work under Dr. Ian Whishaw involved food carrying and hoarding behaviour and work with Dr. Rob Sutherland involved the cingulate cortex and spatial memory. He then received a M.Sc. in Neuroscience from the University of Western Ontario under Dr. D Peter Cain and Dr. Stan Leung where his thesis was concerned with febrile seizures and behaviour. Since then, he has been a research technician in the Pacific Parkinson’s Research Centre under various PI’s.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Starting in summer 2023, Isaac will be working with Gelareh on her project testing the sculpting hypothesis of postnatal neurogenesis. As a research assistant under both the Snyder and Madhav labs, he hopes to learn new skills with his first experience in engineering. Going into his fourth year of a Behavioral Neuroscience major with biology minor, Isaac is interested in the cellular and molecular events underlying behavior and the methods used to study them.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Gurnoor is a fourth year Biomedical Engineering student specializing in Systems and Signals Design. As part of her USRA-NSERC grant, she will be working under the aegis of Dr. Manu Madhav and Dr. Adam Lester on building the hardware and electrical systems of the MAZE apparatus. As an aspiring Neural Engineer passionate about developing tools for early diagnosis of neurological disorders, Gurnoor hopes to develop her technical skillset through her degree and work experience at the NC4 lab.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Matin is a third-year Biomedical Engineering student specializing in cellular bioengineering. Since joining the lab through the SBME SYNERGY program, he has developed a gantry feeding system for the MAZE, trained rats using the DOME protocol, and fabricated tetrode drives for hippocampal place cell recording. Matin envisions a future in medical school, where he can apply his understanding of complex neural mechanisms to advance the treatment of mental conditions, ultimately hoping to utilize technology to revolutionize healthcare.