How SURFiN Fellowships Jump-Started These 3 Neuroscience Students’ STEM Careers

An opportunity and mentorship can shape an undergraduate student’s future, as three former fellows of the Shenoy Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Neuroscience (SURFiN) experienced firsthand. The program provides students with the opportunity to conduct research in a lab funded by the Simons Foundation’s Autism & Neuroscience division, opening the door for paid, hands-on experience that the students might not otherwise be afforded.

A chance opportunity with a biochemistry assignment sent Florence Gathoni Njoroge down a rabbit hole that led her to a SURFiN Fellowship and ultimately landed her a job in a neuroscience lab at Johns Hopkins University. A professor’s comment about applying math to brain studies prompted Alex Negrón to begin thinking about conducting research. For Faith Cerbo, a scientist’s encouragement sparked her interest in neurological diseases. Their stories below show how opportunities created through the SURFiN Fellowship can propel careers.

Florence Gathoni Njoroge (Class of 2024–25)

Gathoni Njoroge’s rabbit hole was a literature review about transcription factors involved in Alzheimer’s disease — a homework assignment at Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she was studying. “It was the beginning of my curiosity about how the brain works,” she says. She came across the SURFiN Fellowship Program on the career networking site Handshake and landed in a social neuroscience group run by Gabriela Rosenblau at George Washington University.

Rosenblau, an investigator with the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), studies how adults and children learn about and form relationships. Gathoni Njoroge grew up in Kenya, where all her potential role models in science were men. Seeing so many women in Rosenblau’s group “was empowering,” Gathoni Njoroge says. She went on to help analyze a dataset to study how adults with autism form and use social knowledge.

During a virtual networking event for the SURFiN Fellowship, Gathoni Njoroge met Daniel Pederick. Pederick, another investigator supported by SFARI, was starting up his lab at Johns Hopkins and needed technicians. Since August 2025, Gathoni Njoroge has been working in Pederick’s lab looking at how brains are wired for processing sounds. She’s learned how to analyze RNA activity in mouse brains; next she hopes to study songbirds. It’s clear to her now that she wants to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She’s still searching for the right subdiscipline before applying to graduate school.

She credits the fellowship and a supportive community for her career successes. “I would not have been able to do this myself,” she says. Her advice to would-be fellows: “Just apply, because you never know. It’s a way to put your foot in the door.”

Alex Negrón (Class of 2021–22)

Negrón put his foot in the door when a notice about the SURFiN Fellowship showed up in his email. Negrón was majoring in mathematics at Illinois Institute of Technology. He says that he had been mildly curious about his adviser’s interest in a neuroscience project, but “it had never occurred to me that there might be math in neuroscience.” During the fellowship, he worked with Brent Doiron, an investigator with the Simons Collaborations on the Global Brain, at the University of Chicago. There, he developed a mathematical model to explain an apparent paradox in the function of two groups of neurons in the mouse visual cortex. He was the first co-author on the resulting 2024 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Before the fellowship, Negrón had been toying with going into quantitative finance, a career with high earning potential, but “in the course of doing this project, I realized I liked doing research.” Yet he didn’t feel ready to enter a Ph.D. program, so he began a post-baccalaureate fellowship with Ila Fiete in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fiete’s new lab was applying machine learning to the field, and  Negrón spent two years exploring the modularity of artificial neural networks.

That work influenced him to pursue a Ph.D. in applied and computational mathematics at Princeton University under the supervision of Boris Hanin. “I like to think about high-dimensional systems,” whether artificial or the brain, Negrón explains. “There are common mathematics in all of these.”

He credits his SURFiN Fellowship with providing great mentors who taught him the importance of clearly presenting his research and who got him started on this path: “If there were no programs like this, people like me would not be in grad school.”

Faith Cerbo (Class of 2024–25)

For her SURFiN work, Cerbo wanted to find a lab that would enable her to dive more deeply into molecular genetics so she could apply her undergraduate training to neuroscience. Through SURFiN she was matched to work in Bernardo Sabatini’s lab at Harvard. Sabatini is an investigator with the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain (SCPAB) and the Simons Collaborations on the Global Brain, and the lab uses several approaches to understand how brain circuits develop and change through learning. While finishing her undergraduate degree at Boston University, Cerbo worked with postdoctoral researcher Tomasz Kula. Already, the lab had genetically engineered a mouse strain whose DNA could be reliably altered, and Cerbo perfected the methodology for modifying genes of interest.

“It’s a novel tool for researchers to analyze gene interactions in the brain,” she explains. She demonstrated that the technique worked with a proof-of-concept experiment, and then continued to optimize the protocols. The technique allows the study of multiple interactions within a single mouse — something that’s been very challenging.

This accomplishment aligns with what a survey course in psychology and brain science revealed to Cerbo about the broad array of technologies needed to understand neuroscience. At the time, “I found myself really drawn to the different techniques and protocols to better understand the brain and behavior,” she recalls. A discussion about doing research with her teacher, Steve Ramirez, pointed her to the SURFiN program and other extracurricular activities. This proved formative.

As her Boston University graduation approached, Cerbo applied for multiple technician positions that would enable her to continue her molecular biology work. “I got a lot out of my year” at Harvard, she says. “I gained confidence in myself as a researcher.”

She had several job offers and opted to join a lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine focused on HIV therapeutics. Her SURFiN experience prepared her well for this job, she says. The Harvard lab used Benchling, an online platform for lab note-taking and data sharing, as does her new lab, and her work at Harvard taught her how to troubleshoot problems in basic research techniques such as PCR and cloning.

In fall 2026, Cerbo will start at the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. She hopes to join a neuroscience lab there where she can continue translational research and work on specific diseases.

“A great neuroscience researcher has the ability to think outside the box, and can step back and think systematically” about failed experiments, Cerbo explains. “Having a blend of hope and realism when it comes to research, especially in neuroscience, is incredibly important.”