Current Lab Members

Tom Clandinin

Professor, Neurobiology

Tom is the Shooter Family Professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. under the guidance of Paul Sternberg at the California Institute of Technology in 1998, before beginning his postdoctoral work at University of California, Los Angeles in the lab of Larry Zipursky. He established his lab at Stanford in 2002. Tom has trained more than 20 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows over his time at Stanford. His honors include an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a career development award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Searle Scholar Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Scholar Award from the McKnight Foundation.

Arnaldo Carreira-Rosario

Postdoctoral Fellow

Arnaldo grew up in Puerto Rico. He did his Bachelors at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. He then went to UT-Southwestern in Dallas, Texas to study how RNA-binding proteins influence germline stem cell differentiation guided by Michael Buszczak. As a post-doc, Arnaldo is training to become an expert in systems neurodevelopment under the mentorship of Chris Doe and Tom Clandinin. He is particularly interested in how activity within short periods of time during nervous system development affects circuit function for the entire life of the organism. Outside the lab he likes to play soccer, try new restaurants and visit friends and family around the US, Puerto Rico and Turkey.

Jesse Isaacman-Beck

Postdoctoral Fellow

Jesse received his B.S. in Chemistry from Haverford College in 2004. After a brief stint teaching Chemistry with Peace Corps Tanzania, he worked with Dr. Ronald Collman at the University of Pennsylvania to define the cell and molecular mechanisms underlying HIV transmission and associated pathogenesis in the brain. In graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, he changed focus to work with Dr. Michael Granato to determine how nerves regenerate in vivo. He spent hours/days/weeks/years mesmerized in front of the microscope staring at larval zebrafish as their nerves (sometimes) regrew. In the Clandinin lab, Jesse currently uses the exquisite genetic tools available in Drosophila to define the molecular mechanisms governing neural circuit stability. Jesse also loves to teach and mentor, and he advocates for Stanford Postdocs with the Stanford Postdoc Association. When he needs to get away, he hops on his bicycle and tries to chase younger guys like John and older guys like Tom up mountains – usually he can’t keep up.

Kevin Mann

Postdoctoral Fellow

Kevin received his B.S. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2004. There he studied calcium regulation of Nitric Oxide Synthase under Dr. Susan Smith and Dr. John Salerno. He then switched fields and began studying Drosophila courtship behavior with Dr. Claudio Pikielny at Dartmouth. He performed his PhD research in the lab of Dr. Kristin Scott at UC Berkeley, where he worked on the regulation of feeding behavior and behavioral hierarchies in Drosophila. Kevin currently studies Drosophila magnetosensation and functional network architecture in the Drosophila brain in Dr. Thomas Clandinin’s lab. In his other life, he manages a team that builds and displays neural network-inspired art installations and blows stuff up.

Ashley Smart

Postdoctoral Fellow

Ashley received her B.A. in neuroscience from Pomona College in 2010. There, with Dr. Karl Johnson, she looked at fly embryos to figure out how glycoproteins help axons navigate through a constantly changing, developing organism to end up in the right location. After a few months in the lab she was so amazed with how something so complex could work that she decided to go to graduate school. In graduate school in neuroscience at UCSF she wanted to understand how caspases (the ultimate cell destroyers) could be active in neurons without killing them. She went deep into protein biology and engineered a light-activated Caspase-3 that she then used on Drosophila test subjects under the guidance of Dr. Jim Wells and Dr. Grae Davis. Now in the Clandinin lab, she is excited to be expanding out from molecules to work toward understanding the brain at a circuit level.
Outside of lab she likes to spend some time drawing and painting, running, playing board games, and exploring.

Max Turner

Postdoctoral Fellow

Max was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, where he worked with Alan Kay to study the structure and function of the cerebral ventricles in zebrafish. He then entered the graduate program in Neuroscience at the University of Washington in Seattle. There he worked in Fred Rieke’s lab to study neural computation and coding in the vertebrate retina. His Ph.D. dissertation research focused on spatial processing of natural images by monkey retinal ganglion cells. In the Clandinin lab, Max is interested in exploring the neural circuit basis of complex visual receptive fields in Drosophila. Outside of the lab, Max likes to go on muddy hikes and look at the ocean.

Ryan York

Postdoctoral Fellow

Ryan was an undergraduate at UCLA in Sociology where he researched the neural bases of birdsong and conducted ethnographic studies of neuroscientists. He went on to do his graduate work at Stanford in Ecology and Evolution with Drs. Russ Fernald and Hunter Fraser studying the neurogenomic bases of behavioral evolution in Lake Malawi cichlid fish. His work is currently focused on 1) developing statistical methods for unsupervised analyses of large behavioral data sets and 2) uncovering genomic contributions to the production of neural and behavioral diversity.

Luke Brezovec

Graduate Student

Luke received his B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Penn State in 2015, and started his PhD in the Stanford Neurosciences program in 2016. He was attracted to neuroscience by its exciting molecular and cellular questions, and is now also exploring systems neuroscience. Currently, he hopes to use in vivo calcium imaging and virtual reality to ask questions about late stage visual processing in Drosophila. Luke's other passion is landscape and architecture photography; he earned a B.A. in Integrative Arts at Penn State and now enjoys photographing the California landscape.

Minseung Choi

Graduate Student

Minseung started his PhD in the Stanford Neurosciences program in 2017 after studying Computer Science at Princeton University. He is investigating how the brain makes predictions about the future. Both inside and outside the lab, he loves to make music in many forms.

Yukun (Alex) Hao

Graduate Student

Coming soon...

Avery Krieger

Graduate Student

Avery studied Cognitive Neuroscience and the history of science (Science, Technology, and Society) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He began his scientific career at Penn studying human color perception and the phenomenon of color constancy with David Brainard, specifically probing humans’ illumination discrimination capabilities through psychophysics. He later deepened his interest in neurobiology and systems neuroscience with Greg DeAngelis at the University of Rochester investigating visuo-vestibular integration and went on to attend graduate school at Stanford University’s PhD program in Neuroscience. Initially, Avery investigated cortical proprioception computations in primates with Krishna Shenoy with the goal of understanding how the brain integrates proprioceptive information into movement planning and execution. He then switched organisms to study fruit flies in the Clandinin Lab. In this system, he hopes to leverage the significant genetic tractability of the fly to understand computations integrating sensory information throughout the brain and across various neural states.
When not in the lab, Avery can usually be found wandering art museums, moshing in concert venues, and hiking throughout national parks, mercilessly making photographs along the way. Currently, he has far more photographic publications than academic ones.

Michelle Pang

Graduate Student

Michelle is interested in understanding sensory processing at the cellular and molecular level. Currently, she is using in vivo two-photon imaging, genetically-encoded indicators of neural activity, and cell type-specific genetic manipulations to study neurons in the early Drosophila visual system. Prior to graduate school, Michelle received her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology (Neurobiology track) and Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 2013, and she studied magnetotactic bacteria in Dr. Arash Komeili's lab at Berkeley. Outside of lab, Michelle likes learning new languages and working with kids.

John Vaughen

Graduate Student

Birth and death, cooperation and competition, maintenance and decay— the unending cellular drama unfolding within us and all living things is truly spectacular to behold. John first fell into this microscopic world as an undergraduate researcher at Sally Horne-Badovinac’s lab (University of Chicago). He then fled the country for a 1.5-year research stint at Tatsushi Igaki’s lab (University of Kyoto) and identified genetic programs regulating cell-cell competition and cancer (see here). John is now captivated by neurons: how are post-mitotic, metabolically active cells maintained throughout life, and what underlies the seemingly inevitable decline of neuron function as we age? By studying genes critical to human neurodegeneration using flies, John hopes to identify fundamental genetic and cellular mechanisms of neuron homeostasis. Outside of lab, John works as an English and technical writing tutor through Stanford’s VPGE and TCP programs, respectively. John suffers from debilitating addictions to biking up mountains and flying back to his beloved Kyoto.

Carl Wienecke

Graduate Student

Carl joined the Clandinin lab in 2016. He uses in vivo, 2-photon imaging of genetically-encoded voltage and calcium indicators to study circuit mechanisms of direction selectivity in the Drosophila visual system. When he's not looking at flies looking, Carl likes to spend time with his wife and their dog, both of whom have visual systems.

Ilana Zucker-Scharff

Graduate Student

Ilana got her B.A. in Neuroscience & Behavior from Barnard College where she was first introduced to neuroscience research in the lab of Dr. Stephen Rayport while studying therapeutic targets of schizophrenia. For her undergraduate thesis work she followed a newfound passion for neuroethology all the way to South Africa alongside Dr. Steffen Foerster to research stress and social behavior in chacma baboons. After graduating, she pursued a curiosity for the underlying molecular mechanisms of the brain to the lab of Dr. Robert Darnell where she investigated the regulation of neuron-specific RNA binding proteins as they relate to human disease. Ilana came to Stanford in 2018 with every intention to continue studying behavior in the brain of mammals but fell head over heels for drosophila neurobiology and joined the Clandinin lab in 2019. In the lab she is interested in the evolution of the visual system and the role it plays in decision making, particularly in the context of social behavior. Outside the lab she moonlights as a huge sci-fi/fantasy nerd and can often be found waxing poetically about the truly superior pizza and bagels in New York.

Estela Stephenson

Lab Manager

Estela received her degree in accounting from the National School of Commerce in El Salvador. She has been working at Stanford for 14 years and joined the Clandinin Lab in February of 2018. She enjoys being outdoors—camping, fishing, hiking, and getting to know new places—and spending time with her family and her lovely dog, Spartacus.

Sharon Su

Technician

Sharon graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018 with a B.S. in Computational Neuroscience. At UCSB, she worked on developing a novel neural network for procedural-based category learning, based on human empirical data. Currently, Sharon assists with in vivo two-photon imaging in the Drosophila visual system. She is interested in computational modeling of visual perception. Outside of lab, Sharon enjoys practicing kendo, playing the bass, and writing music.