People

Jesse Goldberg (Dr. David and Dorothy Joslovitz Merksamer Professor)

Jesse received his B.S. from Haverford College and his MD/PhD degrees from Columbia University. His PhD with Rafa Yuste focused on dendritic computation and microcircuits of the cerebral cortex. In medical school, he became interested disorders such as Parkinson's and dystonia that impair basal ganglia dependent reinforcement learning (RL). His postdoctoral work at MIT focused on vocal learning in songbirds. At Cornell, his lab studies motor control, learning, and social behavior in mice, songbirds and parrots. His guiding philosophy is that comparative approaches distinguish general principles from behavior-, effector-, machine- and species-specific solutions to motor learning problems. Jesse has been supported by the Pew, Klingenstein, and Kavli foundations, as well as the NIH New Innovator and Cornell Neurotech programs.

Brian Kardon (Research Specialist)

Brian received a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT. After briefly working on a PhD in plasma physics at MIT, he received a master’s degree in education from U. Mass Boston, and taught high school physics and biology in the Boston area for 5 years. Having moved back to his hometown of Ithaca, he is now having a great time designing and building hardware and software to facilitate the Goldberg Lab’s study of neural circuitry.

Julie Carpenter (Parrot whisperer)

Julie received her bachelor’s degree in biology from the College of Charleston and her master’s degree in cognitive science at the University of Vienna. She has broad interests in comparative cognition and intelligent behavior across socially complex species, and her master’s work focused on the neurobiology of communication in parrots. She is currently supporting the Goldberg Lab’s ongoing projects while researching neural circuits underlying synchronization of movement and vocalizations in parrots.

Current Graduate Students

Mira Vanchiswar

Following her graduation from Northwestern University with bachelors degrees in Neuroscience and Music, Mira worked in Richard Axel’s lab studying the neural representation of social rank and social identity in mice. Now Mira combines her passions for music and neural circuitry with her work studying the vocal and social behavior of budgerigars. In her spare time, Mira can be found playing the French horn or tending to her enormous collection of succulents.

Ali Plump

Ali earned a degree in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Linguistics at the University of Virginia. She then joined the Fee Lab, studying the effect of delayed external feedback on songbird pitch learning. Now, she has transitioned to a new avian model for her PhD—budgerigar parrots—to study the role of prediction in social-vocal learning. Outside of lab, Ali enjoys playing guitar, painting, reading, and cooking!

Caleb Jones

Caleb earned his bachelor's degree in Biological Systems Engineering from Kansas State University, where he developed a broad interest in neuroscience. After investigating auditory cortical responses in singing birds, he switched to study neural mechanisms of vocal–gestural coupling in budgerigars. He enjoys developing computational tools to model complex patterns of neural activity and behavior.

Jason Gao

Jason was raised in Wuxi, China and received his Bachelor’s in Biology at Haverford College. During his undergrad, Jason studied chemically mediated interactions between marine microbes. Now switching focus from the marine ecosystem to the marvelous nervous system, Jason is looking at how Parkinson’s alters brain dynamics to impair motor control in mice.

Lizemarie Cirone

After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience and Biochemistry from Knox College, Lizemarie worked in the Haj-Dahmane lab studying mechanisms of serotonergic psychedelics. Now she is interested in behaviors like courtship and parenting. Outside of the lab, she enjoys baking, birding, and epic fantasy books!

Undergrads

Ann Greenwood

Ann is an undergraduate student majoring in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Neurobiology and Behavior. She graduated high school in Niskayuna, New York and is interested in studying the neural mechanisms behind motor control in mice.

Undergrad Alumni (current position)

Archana Podury (HST, Harvard, Soros Fellow)

Archana discovered roles of the songbird ventral pallidum in song learning. She and Kamal also identified the connections of the lateral habenula with songbird dopamine circuits. After Cornell, she worked at Neuralink in the Bay area before starting the HST program at Harvard.

Kamal Maher (Computational Biology PhD program, MIT)

Kamal discovered that cholinergic signaling in the songbird vocal motor cortex was necessary for learning. He also identified connections between songbird ventral pallidum and habenula. After Cornell, he joined the Flavell lab in the Dept of Brain and Cogntiive Sciences at MIT.

Frieda Nemon (Neuroscience PhD program, UCSF)

Frieda was an undergraduate student majoring in Biology with a concentration in Neurobiology and Behavior, and a minor in Fine Arts. She graduated high school in Concord, California and is interested in studying the neural mechanisms behind courtship behavior and song production in songbirds.

Tori Riccelli (Mayo Clinic)

Tori Riccelli discovered that the songbird ventral pallidum was necessary for learning. After Cornell, she started med school at the Mayo Clinic. She is currently focusing on basic science in the Dudman lab at Janelia Farm.

Nikil Prasad (Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern)

Nikil used localized brain cooling to study cortical control of licking. After Cornell he enrolled in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University.

Ash Ashok (Washington University Medical School

Ash double majored in Computational Biology and Biometry & Statistics. He completed high school in Vestal, New York and studied neural mechanisms underlying motor control in mice.

Malavika Ramarao (MD, PhD Program, Harvard University)

Malavika was an undergraduate student in the College of Arts & Sciences with a major in Biological Sciences along with a concentration in Biochemistry. She graduated high school in San Jose, California. As an undergraduate she published a first-author paper on the anatomy and development of songbird dopamine systems.

Raghav Subramaniam (Stanford CS PhD program)

Raghav applied his signal processing expertise to help build an automated homecage training system for mice. After Cornell, he joined the PhD program in ECE and CS at Stanford. He now applies deep learning based machine vision methods for SafelyYou.

Eliza Baird-Daniel (Univ. Colorado School of Medicine)

Alex worked on the lab's first major paper on dopamine signaling in singing birds. After Cornell, she worked at the Ted Schwartz lab at Cornell Med prior to enrolling in medical school at the University of Colorado.

Eric Gao (Software engineer, Microsoft)

Eric received his B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Biology. He grew up in Indiana and Pennsylvania, and completed high school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He is interested in the connections between neuroscience and machine learning, and now works at Microsoft.

Alex Farhang (Neuroscience PhD program, Caltech)

Alex worked on the lab's first major paper on dopamine signaling in singing birds. After Cornell, he worked with Evan Feinberg at UCSF prior. He is now a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at Caltech.

Jackson Walker (Jefferson School of Medicine)

Jackson worked on touch-sensing joysticks for resolving mouse forelimb kinematics. After Cornell, he started medical school at Thomas Jefferson.

Nitin Shyamkumar (Applied Predictive)

Nitin graduated May 2017 with BAs in computer science and mathematics. He is interested in counterfactual reasoning in learning systems, both biological and artificial. He works as a software engineer at Applied Predictive Technologies.

Mei Hong Liu (Einstein Medical School)

Mei did it all, from making joysticks to examining the role of cortex in controlling lick kinematics. She is now in medical school at Albert Einstein.

Treasure Nwokeleme (U. Mich Medical School)

Treasure was part of the original Budgie Team and is now in medical school at the University of Michigan.

Eugene Kim (MD/PHD program Baylor)

Eugene was part of the original budgie team and joined Baylor Med after working at the Levine Lab at NIH.

Lab Alumni (current position)

Zhilei Zhao (PI, Chinese academy of Sciences, Beijing)

As a postdoc, Zhilei disocvered a sparse and acoustidcally grounded vocal motor code in parrots. He won the Klarman Fellowship and the Simons Faculty-to-Fellows Award. He is now running his own lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Vikram Gadagkar (PI, HHMI, Columbia University, Zuckerman Institute)

As a postdoc, Vikram discovered dopaminergic error signals in singing birds and their control by social context. He recently accepted a faculty position at Columbia University. For more about Vikram, visit his web page here.

Teja Pratap Bollu (Helen Hay Whitney Fellow, Salk Institute)

Teja developed deep-learning based methods to track lingual kinematics with high spatiotemporal precision. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from VIT University (India), and is now a postdoctoral Fellow with Martyn Goulding.

Ruidong Chen (Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, McGovern Institute, MIT)

Ruidong studied how inputs to songbird dopamine encode predicted performance quality. His papers showed that songbirds have an 'actor-critic' circuit motif (long used in machine reinforcement learning) embedded in their basal ganglia. He is now a postdoc in the Jazayeri lab at MIT.

Anindita Das (Paris-Saclay Inst. of Neuroscience)

Anindita combined viral tract tracing, electrophsyiological mapping and recordings in singing birds to discover that the avian subthalamic nucleus is part of the song evaluation system in finches. She is now a research scientist working with the Hahnloser, Leblois and Giret groups and is loving life in Paris.

Andrea Roeser (Teaching professor, Emory University)
Andrea discovered roles of the lateral habenula in birdsong learning, that dopamine neurons retune during courtship, and that parakeets coordinate their vocalizations and gestures.

Pavel Puzerey (Goodwin Law Firm)

Pavel was a postdoc in the lab who worked on the roles of cholinergic and dopaminergic systems in song learning. An extremely talented electrophysiologist, his efforts drove discoveries for how cholingic and dopaminergic systems support song learning in birds.

Heidi Huang

Heidi worked on cerebellar control of tongue movements and is now training to become a clinical psychologist

Brendan Ito (Froemke Lab, NYU)

Born and raised on the warm and sunny island of Oahu, Hawai'i, Brendan completed his Bachelor's in Psychology with a minor in Chemistry at Hawai'i Pacific University, where he studied modulation of GABAa receptors. For his PhD, he discovered that the superior colliculus implements touch-guided tongue contol. His thesis was highly celebrated with two national prices, the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Science and the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award.

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