Scientists

Dan Sanes
Professor | Principal Investigator
Dan received a doctorate in Biology from Princeton, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and the University of Virginia. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, co-authors the undergraduate textbook “Development of the Nervous System,” serves on the the National Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Advisory Council, and is a Senior Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience. His research is funded by the NIH.

Justin Yao
Postdoctoral Fellow

Justin received his doctorate from the University of California at Irvine. He completed an NRSA-funded study to assess non-sensory neural deficits in hearing loss reared animals, and has begun a K99-funded project that examines auditory processing downstream of auditory cortex in the parietal cortex.

Kelsey Anbuhl
Postdoctoral Fellow

Kelsey received her doctorate from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and is now pursuing an NRSA-funded study on the effect of hearing loss duration during development.

Samer Masri
Postdoctoral Fellow

Samer received his PhD from the University of Arizona, and is now a postdoc in the Sanes Lab at NYU. His research interests include the effect of developmental hearing loss on spectral modulation processing, and the role of GABAergic inhibition in cortical processing.

Catalin Mitelut
Postdoctoral Fellow

Cat is a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at New York University (Sanes lab) and the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology in Basel (Franke lab). He works with machine learning methods and neural recordings from rodents to characterize natural behavior and sensory circuits. His research goals are to create objective paradigms for investigating voluntary behavior in rodents in order to address millennia old questions of free will in complex organisms.

Ralph Peterson
Graduate Student

Ralph is a PhD student in neuroscience at NYU and is co-advised by David Schneider. He is studying social-vocal interactions in a gregarious rodent species, the Mongolian gerbil.

Elena Rotondo
Postdoctoral Fellow

Elena received her PhD in Neuroscience at Rutgers University and now is a postdoc in the Sanes Lab. Her research interests include the effects of hearing loss on perception of complex sounds in noise.

Athena Capo-Battaglia
Undergraduate

Athena is an undergraduate neuroscience major and computer science minor at Harvard. She is currently on a gap year and working as staff for both the Sanes and Schneider lab at NYU. In the Sanes lab, she is assisting with analysis toward identifying and quantifying rodent vocalizations.

Janu Tatachar
Undergraduate

Janu is an undergraduate Mathematics major at NYU. She is currently assisting Justin on his project to understand auditory processing in the parietal cortex. She is also assisting Ralph on a gerbil vocalization analysis project. Janu plans to apply to medical school after graduation.

Madeline Gamer
Undergraduate

Madeline is an undergraduate psychology major at NYU. She is currently assisting Cat Mitelut with neural networks that track individual animal identity in videos of gerbil families to better understand the development of naturalistic behaviors.

Lisa Diez
Undergraduate

Lisa is an undergraduate Neural Science and Psychology double major at NYU. She is working with Cat Mitelut to quantify gerbil behavior and is assisting Kelsey Anbuhl on her listening effort project.

Robert Hotz
Undergraduate

Robert is an undergraduate Psychology major at NYU. He is working with Kelsey Anbuhl to quantify auditory perceptual skills in animals reared with conductive hearing loss.

Aramis Tanelus
Undergraduate

Regan Fair
Undergraduate

Vivian Lee
Undergraduate

Vivian is an undergraduate Global Public Health/Sociology major at NYU. She is currently working with Justin to understand the neural mechanisms of auditory perceptual decision-making in the parietal cortex.

Nina Suazo
Undergraduate

Nina is an undergraduate Neuroscience major and Chemistry minor at NYU. She is currently working with Justin to understand auditory perceptual decision making in the parietal cortex. She plans to apply for medical school after graduation.