Championing Excellence: Meet the Faces of Black in Biophysics
Executive Board
Whitney A. Stevens-Sostre, PhDPostdoctoral Research Associate
Whitney is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Mrinalini Hoon's laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies the mechanisms of circuit establishment and function within the mammalian retina. During her PhD studies she trained under the mentorship of Dr. Gail Robertson. Whitney's doctoral dissertation focused on the role of the hERG channel's cytosolic domains in slow deactivation gating.
Aarion Romany
PhD Candidate
Aarion is a 3rd year PhD candidate at the University of Maryland Baltimore School of Pharmacy. His research is focused on applying computational methods to accelerate covalent drug discovery targeting kinases and GTPases. In addition to accelerating the design of functional biomaterial based on amino polysaccharides. Outside of research, he enjoy's hiking, traveling, cooking, and eating new foods.
Jhullian Alston
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jhullian "J" Alston is an NCI K00 and Burroughs Wellcome Fund PDEP postdoctoral fellow in the lab of TJ Ha at Boston Children's Hospital where he studies transcription factor fusion oncoproteins and their disordered activation domains using a combination of single-molecule techniques and computational biophysics. He did his PhD training under the mentorship of Andrea Soranno and Alex Holehouse at Washington University in St Louis where he also studied disordered proteins.
|
Olivia Dickens, PhDSr. Associate Scientist
Olivia Dickens, PhD is an associate scientist in industry. She is interested in community outreach and science communication.
John S. Del Rosario
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Del Rosario is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Gereau’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently working on understanding how the peripheral nervous system adapts, maladapts, and remodels to sustain neuronal activity as a result of chronic pain conditions, specifically, in the context of ion channel dysregulation, and channelopathies.
Keandreya Morrison
PhD Candidate
KeAndreya Morrison is a 4th year biomedical sciences Ph.D. Candidate at Meharry Medical College. Her research focuses on studying the relationship between host and pathogen through the lens of structural biology in the laboratory of Dr. Tina Iverson at Vanderbilt University. KeAndreya is a Georgia native and completed her Bachelor of Science degree in biology at Fort Valley State University in Fort Valley, GA. Outside of the lab, KeAndreya enjoys traveling, sewing, crocheting, and learning new hobbies.
|
Cheyanne Lewis
PhD Student
Cheyanne Lewis is a Neurosciences PhD student at Stanford University in the lab of Dr. Julia Kaltschmidt. She is currently studying circuit function in the murine spinal cord to better understand how complex sensory experiences are encoded and transmitted to higher brain centers. She is passionate about science communication and enjoys science illustration.
Lisandra Flores Aldama
Postdoctoral Fellow
Lisandra is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Gail Robertson's laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies hERG channel's mechanisms of gating and biogenesis. During her PhD studies, Lisandra trained under the supervision of Dr. Sebastian Brauchi at the Universidad Austral of Chile. As result of her doctoral research, she stablished an evolutionary structure- function correlate of the fast inactivation mechanism of calcium selective TRPV5 and TRPV6 ion channels.
|
Advisory Board
Jamaine Davis, PhDDr. Davis is a biophysicist trained in X-ray crystallography. The focus of his lab is to understand the molecular basis for human diseases. His work is at the intersection of genetics of disease, health disparities and structural biology. A key project in his lab is to determine how genetic variants of the ATP-binding cassette protein ABCA7 confer risk for Alzheimer’s disease, particularly among African Americans who are at greatest risk.
|
Heather Pinkett, PhD
Dr. Heather Pinkett is an associate professor at Northwestern University and Director of the NIH T32 Molecular Biophysics Training Program. She studies the structure and function of ATP Binding cassette (ABC) transporters with an interest in host pathogen interaction.
|
Theanne Griffith, PhD
Dr. Griffith is a neuroscientist. and received her undergraduate degree in neuroscience and Spanish from Smith College and earned her doctorate in neuroscience from Northwestern University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California Davis, where her lab investigates how our nervous system encodes bodily sensations such as temperature and pain.
|
