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.

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

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.

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 of Science degree in Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Toronto, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. Morgan Barense examining the effects of sleep on memory consolidation. Annie’s research interests lie in neuropsychology, particularly the cognitive impairments associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Currently, she is working on the virtual reality (VR) navigation project to investigate changes in spatial navigation behaviours during aging, with the goal of developing a novel behavioural biomarker for cognitive decline.

Graduate Student

Deven is an M.Sc. student in the Department of Mathematics, co-supervised by Dr. Khanh Dao Duc. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University. During his undergraduate studies, Deven held a summer research position at Holland Bloorview Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, where he investigated the neural computations underlying speech adaptation and the benefits of Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) for rehabilitation in children. His current research interests include neural manifold learning and reinforcement learning in the context of navigation. He is working on developing novel methods to decode and control the flexible representation of the hippocampal formation.

Graduate student

As a UBC undergraduate student, Isaac will worked with Gelareh Modara on her project testing the sculpting hypothesis of postnatal neurogenesis. As 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. Continuing his work, Isaac will be joining the NC4 and Snyder labs as a Master’s student in January 2025.

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.

Directed Studies student

Eléna is a fourth-year Cognitive Systems student specializing in Cognition and the Brain. Throughout her undergraduate studies, she worked part-time as a Clinical Innovations Consultant at Click Therapeutics, Inc., leading independent and targeted projects for the Medical Office team. Eléna joined the NC4 lab as a research assistant in May 2024, where she trained rats for the maze project. Currently, she is working on an adaptive training algorithm to enhance rodent learning when trained on a decision-making task.

Work Learn Undergraduate Research Assistant

Grace is a second-year BSc student pursuing a combined major in Computer Science and Mathematics. Previously, she interned at TRIUMF with the Targets & Ion Sources team, focusing on data analysis and tools. She is currently working to combine her interests in technology and research by developing an app to monitor and stimulate lab animals during experiments at the NC4 Lab.

Directed Studies student

Undergraduate volunteer

Directed Studies student

Work Learn Undergraduate Research Assistant

Undergraduate volunteer