Leadership

Phil Barello is the Computer Systems Manager for Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience. He received an A.A.S in Business Management, with concentration in Audio Engineering; an interdisciplinary B.Sc. with concentrations in Computer Science, Business Management, and Philosophy; and an M.Sc. in Computer Science, focusing on sensory networks, machine learning, and cybersecurity. Mr Barello is currently pursuing a Doctor of Technology degree at Purdue Polytechnic Institute, and involved in system development and maintenance for MacBrainResource.

Many years of experience in worldwide laboratories (Russia, France, Norway and Hungary) lend to expertise in the methods of scanning and transmission electron microscopy including pre- and post-embedding immunolabeling. This also let me introduce to Yale the method of three-dimensional reconstruction of large cell fragments such as neuron cell bodies or processes from serial electron micrographs.

Ashley Aké is a rising junior in Davenport College studying Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Joining the MacBrain Resource Center team she will be assisting with the scanning and inventory taking of materials in collections 1-6.

Esmeralda Alejo joined MBRC in 2023. She is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight college majoring in Psychology and pursuing a certificate in Education Studies. Currently she is helping with the inventorying and cataloguing of materials in collections 1-4. She is interested in studying how psychology can inform educational pedagogies.

Mari Elliott is going into her second year at Yale College. She plans to double-major in Biochemistry and English. At the moment, she is scanning and cataloging various materials.

Lucy Greene is a junior in Yale College majoring in Architecture.  She is interested in visualization techniques. She is currently documenting and scanning materials for collection 6.

Fatima Kamara is a freshman at Yale University majoring in Computer Science and Psychology.   She is currently inventorying, cataloguing and documenting materials in collections 1-3.

Montserrat Rodríguez '25 is an undergraduate of Davenport College pursuing a B.A. in Psychology and certificate in Education Studies. Montserrat joined the MacBrain Resource Center team to help with scanning and inventorying of materials in Collection 6 and in the preparation of Collections to be 8 and 9.

Taylor received her B.S. in Psychology from Yale College ('22) and her Master's degree in Public Health with a concentration in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Yale School of Public Health ('23). She has been a member of the MBRC throughout her studies and has assisted with cataloguing, organizing, and scanning materials in the different collections. She has also contributed to a project using MBR materials to explore development in the thalamus and hopes to gain additional academic and research experience as a full-time Postgraduate Associate.

Kyler Worthington is a sophomore at Yale University majoring in History. He is currently scanning and uploading materials to collection 6. He intends to attend Law School.

Dr. Arnsten is an international expert on the molecular regulation of higher cortical circuits, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She received her B.A. in Neuroscience from Brown University in 1976 (where she created the Neuroscience major), and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCSD in 1981. She did post-doctoral research with Dr. Susan Iversen at Cambridge University in the UK, and with Dr. Patricia Goldman-Rakic at Yale. Dr. Arnsten's research examines the neural basis of higher cognition. Her work has revealed that the newly evolved cortical circuits that underlie higher cognition are uniquely regulated at the molecular level, conferring vulnerability in mental illness and age-related cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease. Arnsten's research has led to new treatments for cognitive disorders in humans, including the successful translation of guanfacine (IntunivTM) for the treatment of ADHD and related prefrontal cortical disorders.

Jenn came to Yale in 2015 with 3 years of experience as a laboratory animal clinician, and she became board-certified in laboratory animal medicine that year. She has also spent 2 years as a small animal practitioner and has 1 year of experience in shelter medicine. She attended veterinary school at University of Illinois and completed her laboratory animal medicine residency at Emory University. Jenn practices clinical medicine, is heavily involved in the resident training program, and provides support for biomedical research. Her most recent collaborations have involved translational surgical models used to study peritoneal dialysis, cardiac tamponade, and short bowel syndrome.

Steve Chang is an Associate Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience at Yale University. He is also a member of the Wu Tsai Institute and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. He is the co-Director of Undergraduate Studies of Yale's Neuroscience (NSCI) major. His research aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms of social cognition and social decision-making. Major research approaches include using naturalistic social interaction paradigms combined with state-of-the-art behavioral and neural technologies. The ultimate goal of the research program is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and to learn how these processes may be disrupted in psychiatric conditions with social deficits.

Tamas Horvath is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Medicine and Professor of Neurobiology and Ob/Gyn at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. He is also the Director for the Yale Program on Integrative Cell Signaling and Neurobiology of Metabolism. He received a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.) degree from the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree from the University of Szeged in Hungary. His research has been focusing on neuronal circuitries that support physiological and pathological homeostatic conditions, including processes associated with reproduction, energy metabolism and neurodegeneration.

I have a broad background in signal processing, psychophysics, and computational modeling from pre-doctoral and doctoral work. My doctoral research resulted in the first comprehensive model of visual crowding, a ubiquitous phenomenon in peripheral vision that severely degrades our ability to identify objects in clutter. Crowding is especially detrimental in patients with central vision loss. We also demonstrated that the oculomotor system has a remarkable ability to rapidly and persistently adapt to simulated central vision loss in normally sighted human subjects. During my post-doctoral training at the Salk Institute, I employed advanced electrophysiological and optogenetic techniques in the alert non-human primate to investigate the neuronal mechanisms of shape processing and attention in the visual cortex. My research has uncovered the detailed spatio-temporal structure of shape processing in neurons in visual area V4, a critical area for both shape processing and attention. Our results force us to reconsider the established notion that neuronal invariance increases as one traverses the cortical hierarchy. I have investigated the causal role of low-frequency correlated variability in neural activity on attentive behavior. Further, I have uncovered the cortical layer-specific organization of attentional modulation in the visual cortex. Together, these studies promise to significantly advance our current understanding of the cortical circuits of attention.

Dr. Hyojung Seo received her bachelor and master's degree in Psychology from Seoul National University in the Republic of Korea. She then completed her Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience with her thesis research on the neurophysiology of the oculomotor system. Dr. Seo continued her research in decision neuroscience as a post-doctoral fellow and associate research scientist at Yale University and joined the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University as an assistant professor in 2016.

Caroline Zeiss is a Professor of Comparative Medicine, and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.  She is Chief of Pathology in Comparative Medicine, and established and directed its Pathology Research Core from 2005-2019. Trained as an anatomic pathologist and laboratory animal veterinarian, Dr. Zeiss specializes in comparative neuropathology, ophthalmic pathology and non-human primate pathology. Her experience in neuropathology intersects with her research in animal to human translation of therapies for neurologic disease, and the graduate level course she teaches in comparative neuroanatomy. Similarly, her interest in non-human primate pathology stems from her ongoing clinical role as a laboratory animal clinician, almost exclusively practicing with simians. Dr. Zeiss’ expertise in ophthalmic pathology is informed by her research training in genetics and pathology of large animal models for retinitis pigmentosa. She has published broadly on ocular diseases of laboratory, wild and domestic animals. In collaboration with industry and academic researchers, she performs safety and efficacy pathology studies for ophthalmic interventions. Dr. Zeiss’ research interest focuses primarily on understanding aspects of animal model use that impede translation of promising animal studies to humans. Her interest lies in neurologic disease, particularly in progressive neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. She has applied biomedical informatics, natural language processing and networks analysis to aid large scale evaluation of animal use patterns and the relationship of these to eventual FDA approval. Prior to these efforts, she led an independently funded laboratory focusing on mechanisms of neurodegeneration in retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. She is the Co-Director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Yale, specifically to perform comparative neuropathologic analyses of aging primate brains. Most recently, her translational work has broadened with award of two recent COVID grants, one to determine when COVID will reach endemic status, and the other to assess the impact of concurrent influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infection in hamsters.   Dr. Zeiss' contributions to veterinary education have been through her membership on the American Veterinary Medical Association Council on Education (Chair, 2019), the accrediting body for all US, Canadian and some international veterinary schools. She is currently a member of the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, residing within the National Academy of Sciences. She received her veterinary degree (with distinction) from the University of Pretoria (Onderstepoort) in South Africa. Following an internship in Small Animal Medicine and Surgery (University of Pennsylvania), she completed her Anatomic Pathology Residency training and received her PhD degree from Cornell University.Dr. Zeiss is board certified in Veterinary Anatomic Pathology (2005) and Laboratory Animal Medicine (2012).