Simons Society of Fellows: People

Joshua Benabou is a postdoctoral fellow at New York University's Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics. Benabou received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Benjamin Safdi, and previously earned a diplôme d'Ingénieur and master's in high energy physics from École Polytechnique. His research bridges quantum field theory, high-performance computing, and data-driven approaches to fundamental physics.

Matei Coiculescu is a postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute at New York University and works under the mentorship of Tristan Buckmaster. Coiculescu completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University under the supervision of Camillo De Lellis. Coiculescu's current research interest is to investigate the regularity and uniqueness properties of solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes and Euler equations.

Elaida Dimwamwa is a postdoctoral fellow at New York University working in the Schneider lab. In the Schneider lab, Dimwamwa is studying the neural computations underlying the perception of self-generated versus externally generated sounds, with long-term goals of studying how those same computations go awry in neurological disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.

Alon Dogon is a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University, under the mentorship of Henry Yuen. Dogon’s research focuses on group theory and its interactions with operator algebras and dynamics, including their applications to theoretical computer science and quantum information.

Michael B. Fernando is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Robert B. Darnell at Rockefeller University. His research aims to understand complex brain disease, such as schizophrenia, through advanced molecular biology tools and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) as a model system. He is especially interested in neuronal synaptic plasticity, RNA alternative splicing, and the regulation of RNA by RNA-binding proteins.

Lorenzo Graziotto is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of James McIver at the Department of Physics of Columbia University. Graziotto received his Ph.D. in physics at ETH Zürich, where he worked in the Quantum Optoelectronics Group under the supervision of Jérôme Faist and Giacomo Scalari. His research interests focus on the interplay between light and matter in condensed matter systems.

Minghao Guo is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University working with Greg Bryan. He completed his Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences at Princeton University in 2026, advised by Eliot Quataert and James Stone. Guo is a computational astrophysicist whose research spans black hole physics, high-energy astrophysics, and the multiscale dynamics of accretion flows and feedback in galaxies.

Kip Lacy is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in Andrés Bendesky’s laboratory at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. He holds a Ph.D. in biosciences from Rockefeller University and a B.S. in ecology and an M.S. in entomology from the University of Georgia. Lacy’s research explores unusual exceptions to the typically “fair” rules of genetic inheritance and gene expression.

Destynie Medeiros is a postdoctoral researcher in Denise Cai’s lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She holds a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she trained with Lucas Pozzo-Miller. Her postdoctoral research focuses on how distinct experiences are encoded, recalled, updated, and integrated across time using simultaneous in vivo miniscope calcium imaging and electrophysiology.

Artur Riazanov is a postdoctoral researcher in Columbia University’s Computer Science theory group. Riazanov completed his Ph.D. at EPFL in Switzerland under supervision of Mika Göös. Riazanov's research is centered in concrete computational complexity, seeking to provide unconditional evidence for hardness of computational tasks. During his Ph.D., he worked on hardness of sampling problems, circuit complexity, and communication complexity.

Frank Tucci is a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Pathogenesis, led by Elizabeth Campbell, at Rockefeller University. Tucci obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Northwestern University in the lab of Amy Rosenzweig and his B.A. in chemistry and neuroscience from Wesleyan University. Broadly, Tucci is interested in the many ways microbes respond to and utilize metals.

Hugo Vaysset is a postdoctoral researcher in Sam Sternberg's laboratory at Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. in evolutionary genomics at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, under the supervision of Aude Bernheim and Pascal Hersen. Hugo is broadly interested in tracing ancient evolutionary connections between gene families across bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes to understand the evolution of life at the broadest timescales and guide functional discovery through systematic mining of large biological sequence databases.

Joseph Visone is a postdoctoral research scholar in the laboratory of Naama Aviram at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Visone received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Weill Cornell Medicine under the direction of Kirk Deitsch. His postdoctoral work in the Aviram lab is focused on understanding the molecular dynamics of bacterial host defense mechanisms.

Jingyao Zhu is a postdoctoral fellow at the City College of Technology, City University of New York (CUNY), working with Ariyeh Maller. She completed her Ph.D. in astronomy at Columbia University in 2026, under the mentorship of Mary Putman and Greg Bryan. Zhu investigates how galactic environments shape the evolution of the smallest galaxies.