Simons Society of Fellows: People

Stephon Alexander is a theoretical physicist, musician and author whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics and quantum gravity. He works on the connection between the smallest and largest entities in the universe, pushing Einstein’s theory of curved space-time to extremes, beyond the big bang with subatomic phenomena. Alexander is a professor of physics at Brown University and the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.

Boris Altshuler is a professor of physics at Columbia University specializing in theoretical condensed matter physics.

Ruth Angus joined the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in October, 2018.

Gilad Asharov is an incoming postdoctoral research scientist in the department of computer science at Cornell Tech. He completed his Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University in Israel under the supervision of Yehuda Lindell.

Arkarup Banerjee is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neuroscience Institute at the New York University Langone Medical Center. He received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Delhi, his master’s degree at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and his Ph.D. at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Tobias Bartsch is a postdoctoral researcher in Professor A. J. Hudspeth’s Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience at the Rockefeller University. He attended college at the University of Würzburg in Germany and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin.

Sonja Billerbeck is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Virginia Cornish in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in the interdisciplinary Department for Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE).

Kathryn Bonnen is a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Eero Simoncelli at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. She earned her bachelor’s degrees in computer science and psychology at Michigan State University and received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Texas at Austin.

Y-Lan Boureau was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2014 as a postdoctoral researcher at New York University. She resigned her Fellowship in 2015 after accepting a position at Facebook. She did her undergraduate studies at École Polytechnique in France and completed her Ph.D. at New York University and École Normale Supérieure, working in machine learning and computer vision.

Michal Breker is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Fred Cross at the Rockefeller University. She received her master’s degree in immunology in 2008 and completed her Ph.D. in 2013 at the Department of Molecular Genetics, both at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Timothy Burbridge is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neuroscience Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center. He received his B.A. in biology from Williams College and his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Yale University.

Jennifer Bussell is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Axel in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. from the Rockefeller University and her A.B. from the University of Chicago.

Shana Caro is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, working with Dr. Dustin Rubenstein. She received her A.B. in human evolutionary biology from Harvard University and her D.Phil. in zoology from the University of Oxford, supervised by Professors Ashleigh Griffin and Stu West.

Sylvain Carpentier will be joining the Department of Mathematics at Columbia. He completed his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Victor Kac.

Eric Castillo is an incoming postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College. He received his A.B. in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis and his A.M. and Ph.D. in human evolutionary biology from Harvard University, where he worked with Professor Daniel Lieberman to study the evolutionary biomechanics of the human lumbar spine.

James Dama is an incoming postdoctoral scientist in the department of chemistry at Columbia University. He completed his Ph. D. at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Gregory Voth on multiscale physics methods for the study of biomolecules, with particular focuses on adaptive enhanced sampling methodology and the physics of many-body coarse-grained free energies.

Jairo A. Diaz is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Soft Matter Research at New York University. There, he investigates the dynamics and self-assembly of soft matter at the mesoscopic scale with Professor David J. Pine. Diaz received his B.S. from the National University of Colombia, Bogota, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University.

Sara Fenstermacher is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Jeremy Dasen at New York University. She received her B.A. from Bucknell University and Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University.

Logan Grosenick is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University, where he worked with Karl Deisseroth and Marc Levoy developing novel methods for volumetric functional neuroimaging of neural circuits in behaving animals.

Dorri Halbertal will work as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Dmitri Basov at Columbia University, where he will employ optical methods to investigate new physics of quantum materials. Halbertal started as a theoretical astrophysicist and developed advanced numerical models to study supernovae and then changed fields, receiving his Ph.D. in 2017 in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Professor Eli Zeldov.

Arbel Harpak studies how genetic variation arises and how it is shaped by evolutionary processes such as natural selection. Harpak is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Molly Przeworski’s lab at Columbia University, working on statistical and population genetics. He also holds an M.S. in statistics and a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University.

Benjamin Harrop-Griffiths is a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Daniel Tataru.

Keith Hawkins is an incoming postdoctoral research fellow in astronomy at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in astrophysics with minors in mathematics and African studies from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University in 2013 and is completing his Ph.D. in astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, under the guidance of Gerry Gilmore and Paula Jofre.

David Heeger is a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, where he is a member of the Center for Brain Imaging.

J. Colin Hill is a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Columbia University. He attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied physics and mathematics.

Kohei Inayoshi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Kyoto University, Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from Kyoto University in 2014 and currently works at Columbia University as a JSPS research fellow.

Ailsa Keating was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2014 as a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of mathematics at Columbia University. She completed her Ph.D. in the mathematics department at M.I.T., working under the direction of Paul Seidel. Prior to coming to M.I.T., Keating received a B.A. and M.Math. (Part III) from the University of Cambridge.

Dion Khodagholy is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neuroscience Institute at the NYU Langone Medical Center. He received his master’s degree from University of Birmingham (UK) in electronic and communication engineering in 2008, followed by a second master’s degree in microelectronics at École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (France).

Ivan Kozyryev is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Physics at Columbia University. He obtained his undergraduate degree in physics and applied mathematics at Yale University, and for his Ph.D. work at Harvard, he received the Deborah Jin Award for outstanding thesis research in AMO physics by the American Physical Society.

Chervin Laporte is a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy department at Columbia University. He received his master’s degree from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

Dr. Lehmann is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine.

Boris Leistedt was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at New York University. He resigned his Fellowship in 2016 after accepting a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Wayne Mackey is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Neural Science at New York University, where he also received his Ph.D. in cognition and perception. He received his B.A. in psychology from Temple University.

Rafael Maia is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, working in the laboratory of Dr. Dustin Rubenstein. Dr. Maia received his master’s in ecology from the Universidade de Brasília (Brazil) in 2008 and his Ph.D. in integrated bioscience from the University of Akron in 2014.

Bianca Jones Marlin is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Axel in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from New York University School of Medicine and dual bachelor’s degrees in biology and adolescent education from Saint John’s University.

Takashi Onikubo is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Roeder at the Rockefeller University. He received his Ph.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he joined the laboratory of Dr. David Shechter to study how post-translational modifications alter the function of a histone chaperone during Xenopus laevis development.

Krista Perks is currently a postdoctoral neuroscientist at Columbia University with Dr. Nathaniel Sawtell. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, with Dr. Timothy Gentner, where she studied how individual neurons encode flexible representations of vocal communication signals in the auditory system of a songbird.

Maria Pokrovskii is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Frederic Geissmann in the Immunology Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute. She received her Ph.D. from New York University and her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Antigoni Polychroniadou is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, hosted by Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. She completed her Ph.D. at Aarhus University under the supervision of Ivan Damgård and holds an M.S. in mathematics of cryptography and communications from Royal Holloway University of London, supervised by Kenny Paterson.

Ilya Razenshteyn is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University.

Carlotta Ronda is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University in Harris Wang’s lab.

Aditi Sheshadri is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, hosted by Professor Lorenzo M. Polvani. She has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the R. V. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India, and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mijo Simunovic obtained his first Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in the field of theoretical chemistry. Working with Gregory Voth, he applied theoretical modeling and mesoscale-level simulations to study how proteins organize on lipid membranes to change their shape.

James Stafford is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at New York University School of Medicine. He began his studies at Eastern Oregon University as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) with Prof. K. Matthew Lattal, where he focused on behavioral approaches to psychiatric disease-associated learning and memory processes.

Eliran Subag is an incoming postdoctoral researcher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel under the supervision of Ofer Zeitouni, with the support of the Adams Fellowship.

Xin Sun will join he Department of Mathematics at Columbia University as a postdoctoral researcher. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the direction of Professor Scott Sheffield.

Yi Sun will be joining the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University as a postdoctoral research scientist. He completed his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Pavel Etingof.

Lisa Tran is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from New York University, with a double major in physics and philosophy, where she worked with David Pine. She then obtained her Ph.D. in physics from University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with Randall Kamien and Kathleen Stebe.

Li-Cheng Tsai is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University, working with Professor Ivan Corwin. Tsai received his B.S. degree in Physics from National Taiwan University, and later received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Stanford University, with Professor Amir Dembo being his thesis advisor.

Jonathan Ullman was appointed as a Junior Fellow in 2014 as a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of computer science at Columbia University. He resigned his Fellowship in 2015 due to receiving a faculty position. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2013 and stayed there for a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Research on Computation and Society. While at Harvard, he had the good fortune to be advised by Prof. Salil Vadhan. Prior to coming to Harvard, he graduated from Princeton 2008 and spent a year trading stock options on the floor of the American Stock Exchange.

Ashley Villar will be joining the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University under the supervision of Professor Brian Metzger. She is completing her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she works with Professor Edo Berger to study the eruptions, explosions and collisions of stars.

Michael Waskom is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Neural Science at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, where he was a trainee in the Center for Mind, Brain and Computation.

Omri Weinstein was appointed as Junior Fellow in 2015 as postdoctoral research scientist in the department of computer science at New York University. He resigned his fellowship after accepting a position as an assistant professor in the Theoretical Computer Science group at Columbia University.

Zheng (Herbert) Wu is a joint postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Drs. Richard Axel and Michael Shadlen in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University and his B.S. from Fudan University in China.

Robert (Guangyu) Yang is a postdoctoral research scientist in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. He received his B.S. in physics from Peking University and his Ph.D. in neuroscience from New York University working with computational neuroscientist Dr. Xiao-Jing Wang.

Jeroen Zuiddam will be joining the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University as a postdoctoral fellow. He received his Ph.D. cum laude from the University of Amsterdam and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. He is currently a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he works with Avi Wigderson.