Lab Alumni
Here are some former Jagust Lab members and what they are up to now.
Jenna Adams
Jenna completed her PhD in Neuroscience in 2020. Her dissertation research used PET and fMRI to demonstrate that tau deposition in the aging brain was related to patterns of activation and functional connectivity. Jenna is now a postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine working with Dr. Michael Yassa, where she continues to study tau deposition with a new focus on relationships between tau and functional activation in hippocampal subfields during memory processing.
Pablo Aguilar Dominguez
Pablo graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) with a B.S in Biomedical Engineering and from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a M.S in Biomedical Engineering. He is interested in medical image, image processing, and machine learning.
Katelyn Arnemann
Katie finished her PhD program in Neuroscience in 2018. Her dissertation was "Insights on Alzheimer's disease etiology from network approaches in healthy aging". Her research used tools from graph theory to predict and model where Alzheimer's pathology begins and how it spreads in normal aging, with a particular focus on the role of cerebral glucose metabolism. She is now a postdoc in a computational cognitive neuroscience lab with Michael Cole at Rutgers-Newark.
Nagehan Ayakta
Nagehan graduated from Cal after doing her honors thesis in the Jagust Lab on the pattern of beta-amyloid deposition. Now after an exciting summer traveling in Europe, she is back in the lab working with Gil Rabinovici on processing exciting PET data, including PIB, FDG, and tau. Outside of work, she loves to cook, travel, and read.
Rachel Bell
Rachel is currently an MPH student at UC Berkeley with a concentration in Health and Social Behavior and is working as a graduate student assistant at the Center for Public Health Practice and Leadership. She is hoping to work on eliminating health disparities through some kind of policy advocacy in the future.
Anne Berry
Anne is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University where she continues her research on relationships between age-related changes in neurochemistry and cognition.
Xi Chen
Xi completed her Ph.D. in Cognition and Neuroscience with Dr. Denise Park at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her graduate work focused on amyloid deposition and functional activity in cognitively healthy but declining individuals, particularly those with subjective cognitive decline (SCD). Her research also incorporates advanced and exploratory statistical techniques. Her dissertation used latent change score and mixture modeling and functional MRI to investigate neural activity features related to better longitudinal maintenance in cognition. In the Jagust lab, Xi continued the exploration of brain structural and functional changes in normal and pathological aging. Xi is currently an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University.
Laura Fenton
Laura is currently a Clinical Science PhD student at USC, where she will continue to study aging and neurodegenerative disease with Dr. Judy Pa. She is particularly interested in investigating the earliest detectable signs of cognitive decline in order to improve the efficacy of preventative efforts.
Tengfei Guo
During the postdoc period in the Jagust’s lab (05/2018-11/2020), Tengfei has been using PET imaging and CSF biomarkers to investigate: 1) the early detection of abnormal β-amyloid (Aβ) deposition in cognitively healthy elderly adults; 2) the abnormal sequence of CSF biomarkers and PET imaging detecting Aβ and tau pathologies of Alzheimer’s disease (AD); and 3) the temporal dynamics of Aβ, tau and neurodegeneration, and their relation to subsequent cognitive decline in early and moderate stages of AD.
Tengfei is currently an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Shenzhen Bay Laboratory/Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. His lab focuses on how Aβ and tau affect brain structure and function in aging people and patients with AD using PET imaging of Aβ and tau and biofluid markers including plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) assays. He will investigate the risk factors of Aβ and tau accumulation, and how Aβ and tau result in neurodegeneration and cognitive decline in aging people’s brain. The ultimate goal is to detect AD as early as possible and provide novel insights towards the early prevention of AD.
Mark He
Mark is in the Stats PhD program at UNC Chapel Hill. He hopes to be making his way back to statistical applications in neuroimaging and Alzheimer's Disease research in the near future.
Deniz Korman
Deniz is currently a Biology PhD student at University of Cincinnati (another UC!) under Dr. Nate Morehouse. He is working on simulating the ways in which different animals see the world and understanding how sensory limitations shape their behavior and ecology.
Renaud La Joie
Renaud graduated from the Paris 6 university / École normale supérieure with an MSc in Neuroscience and from the University of Caen with a PhD in Psychology. During his graduate training with Dr. Gaël Chételat, he gained expertise in multimodal brain imaging and the neuropsychology of aging and dementia before joining the Jagust Lab for a year as a visiting scholar. Renaud is now working with Dr. Gil Rabinovici at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, just across the Bay Bridge.
Rayhan Lal
Rayhan has loved computers since he was 5 years old and has had type 1 diabetes since he was 12 years old. He was an EECS undergraduate at Cal (2002-2006) with a desire to apply those skills to medicine. Dr. Jagust gave him the opportunity to combine his love of engineering and biology. He got a chance to learn all about neuroimaging, and perform statistical data processing and tons of coding. Since then, Rayhan finished medical school at UC Davis in 2011. He did a combined 4 year residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at LA County Hospital (yes, THE General Hospital). He is currently doing a 4 year combined adult and pediatric endocrine fellowship at Stanford (GO BEARS!) and working with Bruce Buckingham on new diabetes technology. When he graduates 28th grade, he will be able to take care of those with diabetes, of all ages, and continue to perform the high quality research he first learned from Dr. Jagust.
Molly LaPoint
Molly completed her PhD in 2023 and is interested in how the brain changes during aging and disease. Her research focused on the association between amyloid burden, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, and brain structure and cognitive performance.
Andreas Lazaris
Andreas worked in the Jagust lab for three years as an undergraduate at Berkeley under Dr. Jagust and Dr. Gil Rabinovici, where he completed his honors thesis entitled "Subtyping PPA: Towards a Quantitative Approach to Classification of Primary Progressive Aphasia Using [18F] FDG-PET and Domain-Specific Cognitive Performance". Andreas continued his work with the lab after graduation for two years as the PET Research Coordinator at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center. Now in snowy Rhode Island, Andreas is pursuing his MD and MSc in Primary Care Population Medicine at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School, where he is conducting thesis research on subjective experiences of older adults aging in institutional settings.
Stephanie Leal
Stephanie is an Assistant Professor at Rice University in the Department of Psychological Sciences. Her lab performs basic and translational research to understand how our memory system works and how this system goes awry in memory and mood disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and depression. She utilizes state-of-the-art high-resolution imaging techniques, PET imaging of amyloid and tau pathologies, and novel experimental paradigms to understand brain-behavior relationships.
Lab website: memory.rice.edu
Sam Lockhart
Sam is currently an Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine - Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine at the Alzheimer’s Disease Center of the Wake Forest School of Medicine. His research at Wake investigates how we can better disentangle "normal aging" from preclinical disease -- with a particular focus on interactions between vascular and degenerative pathology -- using neuroimaging (MRI and PET) and cognitive methods. Further, we ask if we can intervene (e.g., in cognitively normal elderly with imaging biomarkers for pathology or vascular injury) with some of the more modifiable factors (e.g., vascular risk factors, exercise, diet, cognitive training) and using clinical therapeutics, to produce measurable improvements in brain and cognitive measures.
Sam’s postdoctoral research project in the Jagust lab (F32 AG050389) examined neuroimaging biomarkers of preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Preclinical progression along the AD pathological cascade may be inadvertently conflated with the normal aging process in many studies seeking to understand the causes of gradual cognitive decline late in life. Therefore, the goal was to investigate effects of tau and Aβ accumulation (measured using PET) on structural connectivity between these regions (measured using MRI and DTI), and the relative effects of these brain differences on memory performance. He earned his PhD from UC Davis in 2014, working with Dr. Charles DeCarli to investigate the contributions of age and CVD-related white matter injury (white matter hyperintensities or WMH) to attentional control network function and cognitive performance.
Anne Maass
The ability to form memories for novel experiences is supported by regions within the medial temporal lobe (MTL), which are also differentially and early to be affected in aging and age-related diseases. During Anne’s PhD in Magdeburg in the lab of Emrah Düzel, she tried to disentangle how new memories are formed within MTL subregions by making use of the very high resolution provided by 7 Tesla fMRI. Moreover, she investigated the effects of exercise training on vascular and structural hippocampal plasticity in older adults. Her research in the Jagust Lab now aimed to unravel how age-related tau and Aß deposition contribute to functional changes within MTL memory pathways, using high-resolution fMRI at 3 Tesla.
Shawn Marks
Shawn Marks completed his PhD in 2017, and is currently working as a data scientist for Scoutible.
Adam Martersteck
Adam has a PhD in Neuroscience from Northwestern University. Co-mentored between the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease & the Dept. of Radiology, Adam's graduate work involved atypical dementia syndromes, with successful cognitive aging and machine learning on the side. In the Jagust Lab, Adam aimed to (1) explore the intersection of aging and Alzheimer disease, combining molecular, structural, and functional imaging and (2) learn as much as he could from all the experts here how to be a successful investigator. Adam is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.
Taylor mellinger
Taylor now works with Dr. Gil Rabinovici at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.
Sharada Narayan
Sharada is currently a student at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, where she will earn an MS in Health and Medical Sciences from Berkeley and an MD from UCSF. Her clinical and research interests involve geriatrics, neurodegenerative diseases, bioethics, and the medical humanities.
Kris Norton
Kris is a radiologist specialist working to collect PET data.
Hwamee Oh
Hwamee did her postdoctoral training in the Jagust lab in 2009-2014 and is now an Assistant Professor in Dept. of Neurology at Columbia University.
Raquel Pedrero Chamizo
Raquel is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) with a PhD in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences. She is interested in the role that lifestyle and physical exercise play in healthy aging. During her time in the Jagust Lab as a visiting scholar, her goal was to study how physical activity levels influence brain changes during aging.
Maia Scarpetta
Maia is currently an MPH student at the University of New Mexico with a concentration in Community Health, focusing on the intersection of neuroscience and public health. She hopes to work on improving the neurological health outcomes of and for the Latino and indigenous communities of New Mexico.
Michael Schöll
Michael has returned to the darkness of Scandinavia where he is building up a neuro-PET group at the University of Gothenburg.
Vyoma Shah
Vyoma Shah is currently a PhD in the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley. Outside of the lab, you’re likely to find her playing Scrabble or Chess, enjoying chai tea, chocolate or cheese, traveling, or just exploring new places in the city with friends.
Ida Sonni
Ida moved to Los Angeles to work at UCLA as an Associate Project Scientist. After two years spent in the Jagust lab learning about neuroimaging of dementia, she returned to a hospital environment working in the nuclear medicine division. The main focus of her research is the clinical application of nuclear theranostics to oncology.
Kaitlin Swinnerton
Kaitlin is a Research Data Analyst working with Dr. Maria Glymour at UCSF where she continues to study cognitive aging, Alzheimer's Disease, and dementia.
Victoria tennant
Victoria has started her PhD in Neuroscience at USC, where she will be continuing research in Alzheimer's risk and cognitive aging.
Sylvia Villeneuve
Sylvia is now an Assistant Professor at McGill University. She is the core PET leader of the PREVENT-AD cohort, a cohort of ~300 cognitively normal individuals with a family history of Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Her lab focuses on the impact of AD pathology (amyloid and tau) on structural and functional brain changes. Current projects also aim to determine how genetic and lifestyle factors influence the presence and the propagation of amyloid and tau, as well as their impact on brain integrity and cognitive outcomes.
Jake Vogel
Jake managed the Jagust Lab for three years. He was known as a bold sentry of the databases, an intrepid processor of imaging data, and a spiritual and scientific guide for all lab members, protecting them from administrative red tape, having to answer phones, and the tribulations of faulty printers. He is now a PhD student with Alan Evans at McGill University, using machine learning techniques to analyze multimodal brain imaging data in the context of Alzheimer's disease and other degenerative dementias. In his spare time, he is learning French, biking through the snow, hosting trivia, and playing music with his awesome band.
Tyler Ward
I’m a UC Santa Cruz graduate with a B.S. in Cognitive Science and a minor in Mathematics. Two things I enjoy, aside from work, are traveling and cooking.
AJ Whitman
AJ graduated from Brown with an Sc.B. in Cognitive Science with a focus in Linguistics. AJ is interested in working with computers and imaging data to make exciting discoveries about cognition. Hobbies and interests include swing dancing, aerial arts, and rock music.
Joe Winer
Joe completed his PhD in 2020. He is still studying sleep, now as a postdoc with Beth Mormino at Stanford.
Kailin Zhuang
Kailin graduated from University of Rochester with a B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences with a focus in neurobiology and neuropsychology. She is interested in neuroimaging, cognition, and philosophy of science and her hobbies include running, reading, traveling, and training for the next Spartan race. Kailin is currently a Neuroscience PhD student at UC Berkeley.