The Paul Micevych Retirement Symposium: Steroid Actions in Reproduction was held on Friday, May 26th, 2023 at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center. Speakers included: Kevin Sinchak, Shaila Mani, Sasha Kauffman, Stephanie Correa, Weizhe Hong, Colin Saldanha, Kiran Soma, and Krista Vink Venegas.
The Department congratulates Associate Professor Weizhe Hong on winning the 2023 John H. Walsh Young Investigator Research Prize.
The John H. Walsh Young Investigator Research Prize is awarded to a young investigator for outstanding research accomplishment. Dr. John H. Walsh was a distinguished member of the faculty of the School of Medicine at UCLA from 1970 until his death in June, 2000. His research in the regulation of gastric
secretion and the physiology of gastrointestinal tract hormones was world renown and his contributions through his leadership in gastroenterology were significant both at UCLA and nationally. Perhaps, his greatest passion was mentoring young basic and clinical scientists in achieving successful academic careers. This prize for outstanding research has been established to honor the memory of Dr. Walsh.
Neurobiology congratulates graduate student Gabriel Rojas-Bowe from Professor Anne Churchland’s lab on receiving a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship award. Gabriel is a 2nd year graduate student who proposes to study the neural circuits that support decision-making. He is particularly interested in how animals learn to become expert decision-makers, and how their ability to remain engaged in a difficult task supports this ability. Please join us in congratulating him.
The Department of Neurobiology welcomes new faculty Mario Dipoppa, Ph.D. as an Assistant Professor effective February 1, 2023.
Dr. Dipoppa received his B.Sc. in Physics in 2006 from the Università di Roma I La Sapienza in Italy. In 2008, he received his M.Sc. theoretical physics from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. His Ph.D. was in theoretical neuroscience from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France. From 2013-2018, Dr. Dipoppa was a postdoctoral fellow working on integrating experimental and theoretical approaches with Ken Harris and Matteo Carandini. In 2018, he joined Ken Miller’s Laboratory at Columbia University in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience as an Associate Research Scientist.
Dr. Dipoppa’s research interest is to understand the mechanisms underlying neural computations in the cerebral cortex. He has extensive experience developing computational models of the mammalian cortex and leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze large-scale neural data. He has been focused on understanding the function of cortical cells in the visual cortex namely, how neural circuits implement computations that have potential long-term applications for understanding neurological disorders. Most recently, Dr. Dipoppa, using machine learning decoding methods he developed, demonstrated the relationship between vision and behavior by showing that the geometry of neural representations of visual stimuli were altered by locomotion.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Dipoppa to the faculty.