Meet The Team

Dr. Maria Antonietta Tosches studied developmental biology and neuroscience at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa in Italy. She earned her Ph.D. at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Germany, where she conducted research on the early evolution of nervous systems. As a postdoc at the Max PIanck Institute for Brain Research, she investigated the evolution of the cerebral cortex in turtles and lizards. Since 2019, she is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, in the Department of Biological Sciences.

curriculum vitae

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Jamie received her BS in Biochemistry from SUNY New Paltz in 2018. She previously worked in the Cellular Biology Department at Rutgers University as a research associate, working with zebrafish as models for neural development. She is a driven scientist aspiring to continue her studies on the graduate level in neuroscience. She hopes to bridge her interests in biology and neuroscience through her work in the Tosches Lab as a Staff Associate.

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NSF GRFP Fellowship

Eliza graduated from Middlebury College in 2017 with high honors in neuroscience. Following her undergraduate thesis work in neuroendocrinology at Middlebury, Eliza became a research technician in the Axel Lab, working with Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin. As a PhD candidate in the Tosches lab, she is studying how evolutionarily conserved neural circuits contribute to learned representations of the environment in the amphibian pallium.

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Fulbright Fellowship

Alonso graduated from UNAM in 2017 with BA in biology. He completed a Master's in Biochemistry also at UNAM, working on the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanun) as a model for brain regeneration. He is currently a graduate student at Columbia, being mainly interested in the field of  neurodevelopment: cellular competence, chromatin dynamics, regulation of gene expression, cell type specification, and Neural Stem Cells.

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Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship

 Lu received her PhD in 2020 from Columbia University, where she worked on the mouse olfactory system with Stuart Firestein. Before Columbia, she graduated from Peking University with a Bachelor degree in medical science. In the Tosches lab, Lu is exploring the amphibian olfactory system, in collaboration with the Firestein and the Hillman labs.

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NSF GRFP Fellowship

Eli graduated from McGill University in 2019 with a BA&Sc in Molecular Biology and Philosophy. He is currently a PhD candidate studying how cell types acquire new developmental roles throughout evolution.

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Andrew Matheson earned his PhD studying the neural circuitry for olfactory navigation in Drosophila with Kathy Nagel at NYU in 2021. Prior to graduate school he earned a BSc in Computer Science and Biology at McGill University where he studied vocal communication in songbirds with Jon Sakata. In the lab he hopes to use comparative approaches to understand behavioural and circuit evolution.

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Giacomo studied biology at the University of Pavia, Italy and received a Master’s degree in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Milan, Italy in 2017. He obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK in 2023, working on the amphioxus nervous system and the origin of the brain in the lab of Dr Elia Benito-Gutiérrez. Giacomo is passionate about nervous system evolution and, in the Tosches lab, he is interested in reconstructing the evolution of cell type diversity in the vertebrate forebrain.

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Ruth L. Kirchenstein NRSA Fellowship (NINDS)

Nicholas is a doctoral student in the Tosches lab who is studying the neural organization and connectivity of sensory systems in Pleurodeles. Nicholas grew up in Kuala Lumpur and studied Neural Science at New York University. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 2016, Nicholas spent time in research positions at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Simons Foundation Center for Computational Neuroscience.

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Nedah earned her MSc in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, followed by research on the role of circadian rhythms on reward behavior in rats and on sleep behavior in drosophila. She earned her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on how scientists draw from lived experience to shape behavioral concepts. In the Tosches Lab, Nedah brings philosophy, history, and neuroscience into closer conversation by continuing to examine the many facets of model and tool use in behavioral experimentation, including the roles of researchers in their experiments.  

Tori received her B.A. in neuroscience and psychology from Williams College in 2022. She then worked for a year in the lab of Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor at Columbia University studying phantom limb pain in a rodent model. She is currently rotating in the Tosches lab as a first year PhD student in the Biological Sciences Program. She is interested in evolutionarily conserved neural circuits mediating innate and learned behaviors.​
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Mayra grew up in Istanbul and graduated from Columbia University in 2024 with a B.A. in Neuroscience & Behavior and English. As an undergraduate, she worked at SCAN Lab under Prof. Kevin Ochsner researching social behavior and emotion regulation. At Tosches Lab, she is interested in delving into the biological methodologies of neuroscience and learning about neural regeneration and evolution. 

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Johanna grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina and earned her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Imperial College London. She then pursued a Master's degree in Computational Biology at Cambridge University, where she explored the intersection of biology and technology. After completing her Master's, Johanna joined the Yuste Lab at Columbia University as a technician, investigating how neurons communicate and form behaviors using hydra as a model organism. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Columbia Biological Sciences program, focusing on sensory systems and behaviors.

Erica graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2024 with her B.A. in Biology and Anthropology. While at WashU, she worked in the Corbo Lab studying the transcriptional regulatory networks driving photoreceptor differentiation during chicken retinal development. She is interested in the regulation of cell type differentiation during development and the evolution of cell type diversity.

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