Lab Members

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DR. NOELLE L'ETOILE
Professor

I have always been fascinated by the human brain. Although my first love of literature gave me the clearest window into the functioning of the human brain, biochemistry, provided the physical practical blocks upon which life and the brain are created. I trained biochemist in Arnie Berk's lab at UCLA in hopes that I could use the critical, reductionist approaches provided by biochemistry, molecular genetics to study behavioral plasticity at the level of molecular interactions and in this way to understand the brain.

For my post-doctoral studies, I joined Dr. Cori Bargmann’s lab, where I was introduced to the charismatic C. elegans. I became enchanted with the worm and started my own lab in an attempt to have it all by trying to understand behavioral plasticity at the molecular, cellular and circuit levels.

At UCSF, Nando Muñoz-Lobato, a post-doc in the lab studying long term memory, blew apart my reductionist’s understanding of the world and how to approach memory. We kept hitting a wall when we ignored the dynamics of the neural circuit. So, we were thrilled to collaborate with the Kato and Wittmann groups to try to image the whole worm’s brain as it learns, maintains, and recalls the memory of a smell.

Raymond is from a small apple-pickin’ town in central Massachusetts. At UCSF he is a PhD student in the neuroscience program, and is co-mentored by Dr. Noelle L'Etoile and Dr. Saul Kato. Ray studies the relationship between neural network structure and function. Specifically he’s interested in how flexible but controlled behavior emerges from the comparatively simple worm brain. He hopes his research will lead to a better understanding of fundamental properties of neural dynamics and inform the design of machine learning NNs, but really he just thinks brains are super cool.

Check out his BioRxiv and

connect with him on Research Gate and GitHub!

RAYMOND DUNN
Graduate Student

DR. FATEMA MASHEL SAIFUDDIN
Post-Doc

Fatema Saifuddin was a TETRAD graduate student who graduated September 2024. She did a short postdoc with us using whole brian recordings to investigate what a worm does after training - she found some remarkable things including that they learn a new motor plan and they may be practicing it as they sleep after training. She studied the role of the TRPV-like cation channel, OSM-9, in the context of learning and memory in C. elegans. You can read about it in her BioRxiv paper. She is now in interning at the NIH.

Outside of science, she is participating in the GRAD 210 DEI Fellowship where she is building a peer-led mental health program for students, staff, and faculty. In her free time, she takes her cat on walks, eats everything in sight, says she is going hiking every week but never goes, and is learning how to play pool very slowly.

Laura grew up in New Jersey, and stayed on the east coast to recieve her B.S. at Harvard. She moved to the Bay Area to earn her PhD at Stanford and has now transitioned to UCSF. She discovered that worms can do a really cool thing - collective dance she dubbed the WormNado. She is busy designing physics-inspired experiments to understand what the worms are sensing. One of her tests revealed that C. elegans can remotely sense evaporation - they don't have to be in contact with evaporating water to seek it out! Stay tuned.

Outside of lab, she enjoys hitting the slopes and knitting her world-renown sweaters with llamas. Oh, and she's the first place and people's choice winner of the UCSF postdoc Slam!

DR. LAURA PERSSON
Post-doc

DR. RASHMI CHANDRA
Joint Post-Doc with Dr. Denke Ma

Rashmi's scientific career began at the University of Calcutta in India where she earned her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in human physiology and biochemistry, respectively. She then traveled to Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where she received her Ph.D. in Dr. Joy Alcedo's lab in 2019.

She is lead author on the sleep paper as she designed and executed the experiments that showed worms require sleep to store memory and proved sleep is sufficient to strengthen a weak memory. She also showed the the ALA sleep promoting neuron is required for sleep an memory after training.

Currently, she works on a variety of projects in ours and Dengke Ma's lab. In our lab Rashmi and Angel Garcia developed an optogenetic system that utilizes the plant derived protein miniSOG that allows them to inactivate cells in the worm's nervous system. This allowed her to probe the role of glial cells in sleep, learning, and memory. She intends to further understand exact molecular pathways behind these different relationships.

Kevin graduated from SF State in 2021 and is now doing his research at UCSF in the L’Etoile lab, while completing his Master’s in Cell and Molecular Biology at SFSU. His research involves looking at worm brains to better understand sleep’s role in creating long term memory. Kevin plans to study synaptic connections downstream of the sensory AWC neuron (responsible for detecting attractive odors) in C. elegans by doing lots of whole-brain imaging. We expect to see differences in these synaptic connections in worms that have the opportunity to sleep after being trained to avoid butanone (a known attractant) compared to those that are trained with no sleep. He hopes this will lead to a better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which sleep regulates the activity patterns required for memory.

When Kevin is not in the lab, he can usually be found hiking, baking, or hanging out with his plants.

KEVIN DAIGLE
Staff Research Associate

Veronica is the backbone of the L'Etoile lab. She works tirelessly to support the various research activities of the L'Etoile lab by providing the lab with a constant supply of media, reagents, basic lab equipment maintenance, ordering and bookkeeping. She is an integral part of the team and we would not be able to reveal the secrets of biology without her.