Principal Investigator

Dr. Lara Maria Rangel received a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2012.  She conducted her postdoctoral work in the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative, based at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she investigated the rhythmic coordination of neural spiking activity in the rodent hippocampus. In 2015, she became a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD, and began investigating the relationship between local circuit level processes in the brain and extracranially measured brain rhythms. Her research tests whether rhythmic activity is important for coordinating the processing of information in organized networks of neurons. Her goal is to provide new insight into the single cell interactions underlying the occurrence of brain rhythms measured in rodents and humans.

Graduate Students

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Scott graduated with a B.S. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2023. He is interested in the neural mechanisms of empathy and prosocial behaviors. His current work focuses on dynamic interactions within reward and interoceptive systems that promote prosocial behaviors in rats.

Research Assistants

Chris received his A.A. in General Science from Santa Monica College and graduated with a B.S. in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience and a minor in Biology from UCSD in 2021. He is interested in decoding the neuronal mechanisms behind cognitive processes in efforts to help translational researchers develop new biomarkers and treatments for cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders. He is currently investigating how neural oscillatory activity in the hippocampus mediates associative memory processing.

Athena is a UC LEADS and BUMMP Scholar who graduated with a B.S. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2023. Athena is our resident  whisperer and dentate gyrus physiologist. She examines dynamic rhythmic activity in the hippocampus across learning and recall. She has been known to say that she can look at the rich local field potential data of the hippocampus “all day” – and you can find her in the lab doing exactly that.

Undergraduate Students

Trinity Gao

Austin Hutton

Sophie Neale

Yazmin Ortega

Vidhi Oswal

Kaushika Uppu

Lucy Wang

Keyi Yu

Ian Zane

Alumni

Dr. Pamela Rivière

Dr. Teryn Johnson

Veronica Hernandez

Nel Satriya

Mia Borzello

Yufei Ge

Luowen Yu

Diana Presas-Ramos

William Supian

Jialin Wang

Austin Gallagher

Vani Taluja

Jerry Scott

Marisa Grams

Theodoros Kapogianis

Nicholas Peterson

Sitarah Zemar

The original lab members during construction of the lab (left to right: Dr. Teryn Johnson, Jerry Scott, Dr. Lara Rangel, and Dr. Pamela Rivière). We enjoy a diversity of perspective. We believe it is important to help each other out.