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

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.

Ian received his B.S. in Mathematics and Cognitive Science from UC San Diego in 2025. He is broadly interested in how neural circuits support social and decision processes. His current projects investigate the temporal organization of hippocampal interneuron activity in rhythmic networks, and the neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie social buffering.

Research Assistants

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

Alex Nakashima

Ariha Shah

Jonavin Wu

Andrew Gibson

Chris Shang

Sophie Neale

Yazmin Ortega

Alumni

Dr. Pamela Rivière

Dr. Teryn Johnson

Trinity Gao

Austin Hutton

Vidhi Oswal

Kaushika Uppu

Lucy Wang

Keyi Yu

Veronica Hernandez

Nel Satriya

Dr. 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.