Dec 2015
Shown in picture, back row, left to right: Nicole, Olivia, Xiaoto Jin, front row: Laura, Nicki.
Lab Members
Jianli Sun, PhD - Instructor
Jianli joined the lab in 2013. Jianli has been studying the cellular effects of mild traumatic brain injury in YFP-h mice.
Nicole Ekanem, MS - PhD student
Nicole joined the lab as a student volunteer in January of 2013. She subsequently became a Master's student in the department of Anatomy & Neurobiology. She was part of our beginning studies using the technique of optogenetics combined with whole cell patch clamp. She received her Masters' degree in 2015. Nicole is currently a PhD student in the lab and continues to use optogenetics to understand the role of inhibitory interneurons in epileptiform activity associated with developmentally malformed cortex.
Olivia Bowles, MS
Olivia joined the lab as a Masters student in October of 2014. She successfully defended her Masters thesis in the summer of 2016. Olivia has remained in the lab and continues to work on a potential treatment for epileptiform activity associated with cortical microgyria.
Grace Lee - Technician
Grace joined the lab in December of 2015 as a full time technician. She quickly mastered our large and complicated animal colony needs as well as immunohistochemistry, microscope use, and electrophysiological field potential recordings.
Kareem Clark - PhD student in the Dupree Lab
In 2014 we began a collaboration with the Dupree lab that involves Kareem making recordings in their model of multiple sclerosis. Kareem will include the data collected in his PhD thesis.
Nicki Weston - Technician, currently VCU PhD student
Nicki joined the lab in July of 2014 as our main technician. Nicki maintained the animal colony through the winter of 2014 and all of 2015. In 2015 she began her own study examining the potential for inhibitory interneurons to initiate epileptiform activity. She is currently in the VCU Neuroscience PhD program.
Laura Reed - Technician, currently VCU MD student
Laura served as the lab's fulltime technician from May 2013 through the summer of 2014. She learned every technique in the lab during her tenure here. In August of 2014 Laura joined the VCU MD program, but also continued to do experiments in the lab.
Sahaj Mujumdar - MD student researcher
Sahaj joined the lab in the summer of 2016, before entering his first year of medical school at VCU. Sahaj will spend the summer of 2017 working on intracellular signaling of mGluR5 in the malformed cortex.
Bishakha Dhamala - undergraduate researcher
Bishakha joined the lab in November of 2016. She is currently examining the network conditions under which epileptiform activity is produced in the malformed brain.
Shiva Rings - undergraduate researcher
Shiva joined the lab in January of 2017. He is currently examining the network conditions under which epileptiform activity is produced in the malformed brain.
