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 co-authored the undergraduate textbook “Development of the Nervous System,” served on the the National Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Advisory Council, was a Senior Editor at the Journal of Neuroscience, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010. The focus of his NIH-funded research centers on the influence of auditory experience (e.g., social learning, hearing loss) on CNS maturation.

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.

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. He is also working with Alex Williams to develop new tools for localizing and attributing vocalization in a naturalistic, multi-animal environment.

Estelle in 't Zandt
Graduate Student

Estelle received her undergraduate degree from the University of Florida. She is currently working on auditory social communication in gerbils, and the effect of early experience.

Lisa Diez
Research Associate

Lisa is a Research Associate in the Sanes Lab. She graduated from NYU with a double major in Neural Science and Psychology. She is currently working on auditory social learning experiments, and collaborates with Cat Mitelut to quantify gerbil behavior.

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.

Vivian Lee
Undergraduate

Vivian is an undergraduate Global Public Health/Sociology major at NYU. She worked with Justin Yao, studying auditory decision-making and is currently working with Kelsey Anbuhl to study the neural mechanisms of auditory effort in the cingulate-to-auditory cortex network.

Aramis Tanelus
Undergraduate

Aramis is an undergraduate Neural Science major at NYU. He is working with Ralph Peterson to develop a system with which to conduct long-term, continuous recordings from gerbil families through multiple high-bandwidth microphones and cameras, and is working on a method of localizing vocalizations in naturalistic, multi-animal settings. Aramis is the recipient of a 2022 Matthew Pecot Fellowship from the McKnight Foundation.

Regan Fair
Undergraduate

Regan is an undergraduate Neural Science major at NYU. Working with Samer Masri, she is studying a method for restoring auditory cortex synaptic inhibition following developmental hearing loss, including its ability to rescue auditory perceptual deficits.

Nikki Lee
Undergraduate

Nikki is an undergraduate Neural Science major. She is working with Kelsey Anbuhl to understand the anatomical projections from the cingulate cortex to auditory cortex, and its functional role in listening effort.