Elena Gracheva, PhD
Elena Gracheva, PhD, received her PhD from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2008 and performed postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, working on infrared sensation in snakes and bats. In 2012, Dr. Gracheva started her lab at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is also co-–founder of Sensory Physiology Club, an independent outreach program for students from high schools in the greater New Haven, New York, and Boston areas. The main goal of Dr. Gracheva’s lab is to understand the cellular, molecular, and physiological basis of mammalian hibernation. Her lab employs multidisciplinary approaches, including naturalistic animal behavior, electrophysiology, imaging, genomics, transcriptomics, and single-cell sequencing. Her notable contributions to science include discovering mechanisms of cold tolerance and fluid ionic balance in hibernators. Her group will apply these approaches to reveal molecular and cellular signatures associated with Parkinson’s disease.
Viviana Gradinaru, PhD
Viviana Gradinaru, PhD, is Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering at Caltech. Her research group has developed optogenetic, tissue clearing, and gene delivery methods for accessing function and anatomy in the vertebrate nervous system and is now applying them to study circuitry underlying neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Combining neuroscience, protein engineering, and data science, her laboratory has produced microbial opsins that are tolerated by mammalian cells and viral capsids capable of crossing the blood-–brain barrier in adult mammals, which could enable high-precision, minimally-invasive repair of diseased nervous systems. Dr. Gradinaru has received, amongst many honors, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and outstanding young investigator awards from both the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and the Society for Neuroscience. Alumni from the Gradinaru laboratory went on to successful careers in academia and industry.
Michael Tadross, MD, PhD
Michael Tadross, MD., PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology at Duke University, where he develops genetically encoded technologies to target clinically relevant drugs to specific cell types in the brain. His lab applies these methods to mouse models of neuropsychiatric disease to determine which brain cell types are responsible for beneficial versus harmful effects, providing a roadmap for development of targeted therapeutics. He received a BS in electrical and computer engineering with a minor in chemistry at Rutgers, an MD/Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins,; postdoctoral training in cellular neuroscience at Stanford, and began independent research as a fellow at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus.
