People
Jesse Goldberg (Principal Investigator)
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.
Zhilei Zhao (Post-doc, check out my website)
Zhilei grew up in southwest China and received his B.S. from Peking University in Beijing. He worked with Dr. Lindy McBride at Princeton University on mosquito olfaction and received his PhD in Neuroscience and Evolutionary Biology. Zhilei is passionate about using specialized species to understand general principles of neuroscience. Currently, he is studying the neural mechanisms of social learning and memory in budgies, focusing on dopamine signaling and hippocampus.
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
Brendan Ito
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 left the cozy island weather and traveled nearly 5,000 miles to upstate NY to understand the neural mechanisms underlying sensorimotor decision making in mice.
Heidi Huang
Heidi grew up in Beijing and completed her Bachelor’s degree in Biology at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, where she studied visually guided behaviors in mice. In Heidi’s new chapter of life as a PhD student, Ithaca never ceases to fascinate her and so are the cognitive processes underlying the dynamic movements of mice.
Caleb Jones
Caleb received his bachelor's in biological systems engineering from Kansas State University and developed a broad interest in how our brains predict and interpret environmental stimuli to modify actions. Now, Caleb studies neural circuits underlying songbirds' adaptive evaluation of their own song performance in changing social environments.
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
Ash Ashok
Ash is double majoring in Computational Biology and Biometry & Statistics. He completed high school in Vestal, New York and is interested in the neural mechanisms underlying motor control in mice.
Malavika Ramarao
Malavika is 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 and is interested in understanding the neural circuits that allow for trial and error learning in songbirds.
Frieda Nemon
Frieda is 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.
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.
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.
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)
Pavel Puzerey (Clark+Elbing)
Pavel was a postdoc in the lab who worked on the roles of cholinergic and dopaminergic systems in song learning. He is now at the law firm of Clark+Elbing.
Vikram Gadagkar (PI, 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 received her both her master’s degree in biology and bachelor’s degree in biology and mathematical sciences from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. There she worked in Dr. Eric Fortune’s Electric Fish Lab studying multisensory integration. Andrea discovered roles of the lateral habenunla in birdsong learning, that dopamine neurons return during courtship, and that parakeets coordinate their vocalizations and gestures.