Lab Members at Large
Spencer, Resident Expert and Field Researcher in Attachment (and other) Behaviors
Principal Investigator
Devanand Manoli, MD, PhD
Dev received his B.S. in Biology and B.A. in French Literature, and his M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University. Dev's interests lie in understanding the neural, molecular, and genetic bases of affiliation and social attachment, and how they can be disrupted in neuropsychiatric disorders. Dev's graduate work with Bruce Baker focused on understanding the neural basis for male sexual behavior in Drosophila, specified by the male-specific Fruitless transcription factors. He then moved to UCSF for his postdoctoral work and his residency in Psychiatry and fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As a postdoc, Dev developed tools for molecular genetics in prairie voles. He continues to practice as a child psychiatrist in the UCSF Early Psychosis Clinic.
Specialists
Michael Sherman, Colony Manager/Embryologist
After a brief 15 year stint as a chef, Mike began work in 2003 in basic husbandry and now works as the colony manager and embryologist with the Manoli Lab where he is happy making voles.
Ruchira Sharma, PhD, Associate Specialist
Ruchira earned her B.S. in Life Sciences and M.S. in Biochemistry in India before moving to Duke University to earn her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology. She studied the olfactory receptor trafficking and the regulation of their expression in mice as part of her dissertation work. She characterized the role played by receptor transport proteins that act as chaperone proteins to olfactory receptors, in the gene expression choice made by olfactory neurons. In the Manoli lab, Ruchira is interested in making new reagents using CRISPR to help understand the neural circuits responsible for social attachment. Using prairie voles, a rodent model where the animals are socially monogamous, she wants to study factors driving pair bonding and parental behaviors.
Kara Quine, Junior Specialist
Kara is a former software engineer who recently completed a post-baccalaureate program in molecular biology at Mills College. Her work is currently focused on automating behavioral scoring and developing tools for unbiased characterization of behavior.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Shuyu Wang, MD, PhD
Shuyu completed her A.B. in Chemistry at Harvard College and her M.Phil in Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, where she studied the structural biology of DNA damage repair proteins and the biophysics of misfolding- and aggregation-prone proteins, respectively. She then pursued the MD/PhD program at Harvard Medical School. Her PhD research in David Sabatini’s lab at the Whitehead Institute, MIT focused on the mechanisms of amino acid sensing by the mTOR pathway. During her final year of medical school, she began to explore her burgeoning interests in neuroscience and computational methods in Evan Macosko’s lab at the Broad Institute. At UCSF, she is currently entering her fourth and final year as a psychiatry resident. In the Manoli lab, she is interested in developing automated methods for unbiased social behavior detection and in dissecting the pathways and circuits that underlie pair bond formation at the single cell level. She is ultimately interested in understanding the impact of environmental perturbations on postnatal brain development and social function. Shuyu developed an affinity for (spectating) rowing in Cambridge, UK and is a proud alumna of the MIT Rowing Club in Cambridge, MA – nothing is more peaceful than an early morning spent gliding across calm waters.
Graduate Students
Nerissa Hoglen
Nerissa received B.S. degrees in Engineering & Applied Science and English from Caltech. One of those degrees is abbreviated En, the other is Eng, and she is still not sure which one is which. Nerissa is interested in the neural basis of communication, particularly how representations of sensory signals differ in different social contexts and how those variable representations drive flexible behaviors. In the Manoli lab, she is investigating varying representations of vocalizations in parental and bonded prairie voles.
Barbara Shvareva
Barbara joined the lab in 2024 and is excited to be pursuing a joint PhD between the Bender and Manoli labs where she will be investigating the electrophysiological underpinnings of neural circuits that drive social behavior. She did her undergraduate work in Michael Yartsev's lab at UC Berkeley looking at the neural circuitry of vocal learning in fruit bats and then spent two years in the Feinberg lab at UCSF studying how the brain coordinates the movement of multiple body parts. In her free time, she loves trail running, falling off boulders at the climbing gym, hitting the archery range, and hosting dinner parties for friends.
Joshua Steighner
Josh received his B.S. in Biology and B.A. in Criminology & Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland, College Park. While there, he worked in the Juntti Lab to adapt the CRISPR/Cas9 system for use in Astatotilapia burtoni cichlids and utilized the tool to examine the role of dynamic melanin patterns in male social dominance displays. Now in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at UCSF, Josh is interested in using molecular and circuit-level approaches to explore the neural mechanisms underlying affiliative and agonistic behaviors in prairie voles.
Alumni
Kimberly Long, PhD - Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Gina Williams, PhD - Senior Research Scientist, Olio Labs
Kristen Berendzen, MD, PhD - Assistant Professor, Berendzen Lab, University of California San Francisco
Audrey Jordan - Graduate Student, Brandeis University
Denis Galo - Assistant Specialist, Berendzen Lab, University of California San Francisco
DéJenaé See - Graduate Student, University of Washington
Rose Larios, PhD - Clinical Field Engineer / Medical Science Liaison, Neurona Therapeutics
Karen Rincón Romero
Zachary Watson
Matthew Klinkel
Jenna Wong
Bibi Sulaman
Marie Schulte-Bisping
Martin Krause
Milo Aviles
Nastacia Goodwin, PhD - Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Washington