Esther Greeman

Research Assistant
‍
‍Esther is driven by a multifaceted vision encompassing clinical research, basic science research, and community service while concurrently pursuing a Master's degree in Nonprofit Management. 

Esther adeptly tackled diverse administrative responsibilities and skillfully managed the mouse colony. Additionally, she played an integral role in the team dedicated to the chronic social defeat study, employing her expertise in immunohistochemistry to meticulously prepare brain tissues for precise imaging and analysis. Esther also contributed to the COMBO study, lending her support to technical video coding and conducting qualitative interviews. 

Esther was an invaluable member of the core team responsible for planning and coordinating the remarkable 2022 and 2023 COMBO PLAYDATE events for the local community. She also plays a vital role in our marketing and communication efforts, working to expand the reach and impact of the COMBO study, and designing the monthly COMBO Newsletter to capture the essence and progress of the study. Recognized for her strategically creative acumen, Esther planned our lab celebrations and team-building events, fostering an environment of camaraderie and shared achievement.

Date in the lab: 2022-2023

Eva Sher

Undergraduate (Barnard)
‍
Eva joined the DOOR lab as an undergraduate (class of 2022), recording and analyzing early-life experiences and subsequent adult behaviors in rats. This work included video-recorded behavioral experiments and a combination of manual and automated analyses using Behavioral Observation Research Interactive Software (BORIS) and Ethovision. In her thesis titled "Examining the Effects of Early Life Abuse and Neglect on Empathy and Prosocial Behavior", a found that limited bedding and nesting (LBN), a form of rodent early-life stress (ELS), is associated with lower adult empathy-like prosocial behaviors. Specifically, she found ELS is associated with less motivation to free their cagemate from a restrainer specifically built with an outside lever.

Date in the lab: 2021-2022

Maggie Kyle

Research Coordinator
‍
Maggie received her bachelor’s degree from Emory University in 2019, where she spent three years working under Dr. Mar Sanchez, studying the impact of chronic stress exposure and high calorie diet consumption on structural brain development. As part of this work, she investigated maternal care as a buffering factor against adverse early experience, which led to an interest in mother-infant bonding that she further pursued as an assistant in the Welch/Dumitriu labs.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York in March 2020, animal work was paused, and Maggie’s decision to pursue a career in medicine led to her redeployment to DOOR’s budding partnership with COVID-19 newborn research initiative COMBO. 

After spearheading COMBO during her 3 years with the DOOR lab, Maggie plans on applying to neuroscience PhD programs in the future to continue studying developmental mechanisms of adversity and resilience. In her free time, Maggie likes traveling as much as possible, running in New York’s parks, exploring art museums, and reading poetry.

Date in the lab: 2019-2023

Allie Lipshutz

Undergraduate (Barnard)

Allie joined the DOOR lab as an undergraduate and performed wet-lab benchwork examining behavioral and neurobiological patterns that differ in stress-susceptible versus stress-resilient mice. For her undergraduate thesis, Allie and fellow undergraduate Victoria Saltz joined forces to develop a novel viral tracing technique to examine intra-amygdalar functional and structural connectivity patterns mediating individual variability in stress-responses. During her time in the lab, she also contributed significantly to spearheading the novel data centralization website, MouseCircuits.org.

Allie now works as an Immunology Research Technician in the Perry Laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Date in the lab: 2019-2022

Isabelle (Izzy) Mollicone

Undergraduate (Barnard)
‍
‍Izzy joined the DOOR lab as an undergraduate (Barnard Class of 2022) and worked on a number of projects including wild rat telemetry device development, the COMBO Initiative, and rodent studies. She conducted her senior thesis project, for which she was awarded Departmental Honors, on morphological changes in basolateral amygdala in response to chronic social defeat stress in mice. For this project, she became proficient in single cell microscopy-guided microinjections with fluorescent dies, high resolution confocal microscopy, and dendritic spine reconstructions. 

Following numerous discussions with Dr. Dumitriu about various future paths including in medicine and science, Izzy ultimately decided to pursue a career in dentistry.

Date in the lab: 2019-2022

Lindsy Pang

Visiting Medical Student Scholar
‍
Lindsy joined the lab as a visiting medical scholar to lay the ground for a novel clinical trial aimed at improving the connection of mother-infant dyads in the Well Baby Nursery through guided emotional exchange between the mother and infant. The goal of this intervention is to  improve developmental trajectories in both the short- and long-term, though hypothesized physiological synchronization during the emotional exchange. Lindsy also contributed significantly to a comprehensive systematic literature review on mother-infant bonding interventions, which ultimately found that contemporary interventions yield positive but time-limited and effectiveness-limited improvements on early relational health outcomes that do not spill into other child outcomes such as socioemotional functioning and neurodevelopment. 

Lindsy’s keen interest in multidisciplinary approaches to mental health led her to triple board in psychiatry, pediatrics and child psychiatry at UT Health in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (class of 2025).

Date in the lab: 2019-2020

Aileen Gozali

Postbac
‍
During her year in the lab, Aileen designed, executed, analyzed and wrote up a pseudo-randomized clinical trial of a pediatrician-led parenting course in the Well Baby Nursery, looking at effects on parenting knowledge and confidence at time of hospital discharge. She conducted all study design and implementation, secured IRB approval, performed data collection and analysis, and found the intervention was significantly linked to positive outcomes in parents. Aileen is first-author on the publication detailing these results in Early Human Development.

Prior to enrolling in the post-baccalaureate premedical program at Columbia University, Aileen earned a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School in piano performance. Aileen is currently an MD candidate at UCSF School of Medicine.

Date in the lab: 2018-2019

Elena Baldwin, BA

Postbac
‍
Elena’s interest in neurodevelopment and background in neuroscience led her to join the DOOR lab during her postbac studies, where she quickly became involved in the joint Dumitriu-Arora project on developing tooth biomarkers for time-sequenced pre- and post-natal inflammatory profiling to understand the developmental origins of autism. This led to work in methods development applying neuroscience techniques to tooth samples in the Arora lab, and eventually uncovered a temporal pattern of inflammatory biomarkers in teeth, a world first. Elena presented her findings at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and she is second author on the published 2022 paper in iScience. 
‍
In 2019 she joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and is now an internal medicine resident at the Mount Sinai Hospital, where she plans to pursue a career in oncology.

Date in the lab: 2017-2019

Tommy Chan

Research Assistant
‍
During his Masters degree under the mentorship of Dr. John Morrison at Mount Sinai, Tommy worked closely with (then) DOOR lab PhD student Yael Grossman on developing novel analytic methods for analyzing the molecular profiles of glial cells in chronically stressed and aged animal models. This work led to a first publication in Frontiers of Aging Neuroscience. Following completion of his Masters degree, he joined the DOOR lab as a part-time research assistant, where he continued to work closely with Yael on several projects focusing mainly on the amygdala, mouse behavioral tracking, and spine identification.
‍
Tommy went on to work as a Clinical Researcher at the Cardiovascular Research Foundation where he spent three years investigating Coronary Heart Disease. He became an expert in angiographic imaging and worked on several clinical trials on next generation stents and ischemia. Today, he runs a digital marketing company in fashion and design as well as spending part of lending his expertise to the imaging core laboratory of Mount Sinai.

Date in the lab: 2016-2017