Lab Members
Benjamin Hayden
PI, McNair Scholar
Ben received his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University. In 2009, he was the Outstanding Young Investigator for the Society for Neuroeconomics. Since then, his research has been featured twice in Senator Tom Coburn's Wastebook, a government publication highlighting worthless science.
Anilu Chavez
Graduate student
Anilu received her bachelor’s in Neuroscience with a minor in Computational and Applied Math from Rice University. As a true Houston local, she is pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. She is studying the intersection of spatial navigation and memory; and plans to uncover key insights of the two through machine learning algorithms and neuromodulation.
Katherine Kabotyanski
Graduate Student
Kat received her B.S. in Neuroscience from Duke University. She then worked as a Research Assistant on the Healthy Brain Network at the Child Mind Institute, and then as Research Manager for the Human Connectome Project at Harvard University before starting her M.D./Ph.D at BCM in 2020. She is completing her Ph.D. in the Quantitative and Computational Biosciences program, using explainable artificial intelligence methods for decoding, interpreting, and representing neural signals related to mood and cognition.
Melissa Franch
Post-doctoral fellow
After completing a B.S. in Biology and Science Education at North Carolina State University, Melissa worked as a teacher and research associate. In 2023 she received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UTHealth McGovern Medical School with Dr. Valentin Dragoi, where she discovered cortical representations of social learning. Melissa is interested in social cognition, especially its expression in autism, and continues to investigate neural computations of social behavior in the primate brain.
Georgios Kokalas
Programmer
From Thessaloniki, Greece. Graduated from St. Olaf College in May, 2022 with a B.A. degree in Computer Science and Biology and a concentration in Neuroscience. Currently working as a Research Technician under the supervision of Professor Ben Y. Hayden at Baylor College of Medicine, aiming to gain further lab experience before applying for a Ph.D. program in Neuroscience.
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