Julia is a PhD student in the Neuroscience Curriculum who joined the Cohen lab in 2024. Julia graduated from Saint Louis University with a B.S. in Neuroscience in Fall 2022. There she worked in Dr. Fenglian Xu’s lab where she studied the neurotoxic effects of GPR183 activation in cortical neuronal cell culture. In addition, she worked with Dr. Jill Waring’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience of Aging lab where she collected EEG data from human participants to determine the interaction between aging and emotional processing. In the Cohen lab, Julia is studying how tau knockdown is neuroprotective and how we can leverage this for Alzheimer’s disease therapies. Outside of the lab, Julia enjoys exploring the outdoors, playing pickleball with friends, and trying new foods.

Kyle is an MD/PhD student who completed the first two years of medical school at UNC and joined the Cohen Lab through the Department of Pharmacology in 2022. He attended Cornell University where he earned a Neurobiology and Behavior degree in 2018. There, he studied in the Lab of Dr. Melissa Warden and researched the neurocircuitry behind mood disorders using mouse models of depression. After graduating, he joined the lab of Dr. Jeffrey Friedman at the Rockefeller University from 2018 to 2020 where he studied how the neurocircuitry governing metabolism, feeding, and thermoregulation can be altered in mouse models of obesity. In the Cohen lab, Kyle studies how HDAC6 contributes to the neuroinflammatory landscape in mouse models of neurodegeneration and how this can lead to the progression of neurodegenerative diseases. Outside of the lab, Kyle enjoys cooking, powerlifting, basketball, volleyball, table tennis, and chess. Above all, he enjoys raising his three cats — Theo, Toast, and Tank — with his fiancé Katie.

Shannon is a graduate student in the Neuroscience Curriculum. She graduated from the University of Maryland in 2016 with a degree in Microbiology. She worked as a Lab Manager in Dr. Frank Shewmaker’s Lab at Uniformed Services University where she examined the biophysical characteristics of the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)-associated protein FUS in cell culture. She is continuing her research in ALS through a co-mentorship with Sarah Cohen and Todd Cohen studying the impact of ALS pathology on organelle contacts and dynamics.