News

Trish receives the Eva Kavan Prize from UCLA’s Brain Research Institute

Spectrum News did a piece on Trish's paper about social touch

Nazim receives the UCLA’s 2023 Brain Research Institute Scheibel Postdoctoral Lecture Award

Zoë, Anand, and Nazim receive travel awards from UCLA’s Brain Research Institute to attend the 2023 Society for Neuroscience meeting

Trish’s paper on a new social touch assay for mice is accepted to the Journal of Neuroscience

The lab welcomes a new undergrad research volunteer: David Song

The lab welcomes a new undergrad research volunteer: Lauren Wall

Nazim’s paper on MGE interneuron development appears in Neuron

Michelle attends the Neural Data Science course at Cold Spring Harbor

The lab welcomes a new undergrad research volunteer: Jaylin Hsu

Carlos was awarded the Neurology Department’s 2023 Golden Test Tube Award for mentorship in the lab.

Nazim was awarded a prize for his poster presentation at the Neurology Science Day. Ashley and Sunny also presented posters in the undergraduate category.

Congratulations to Sunny Mula, who was awarded the Bennett & Jeanette Duval Undergraduate Scholarship to conduct research in the lab.

During SfN ’22 in San Diego there was a reunion of current and former post-docs.

Carlos presented at a mini-symposium at SfN ’22 in San Diego.

Dinner for the current members of the Zeiger and Portera-Cailliau Labs at SfN’22 in San Diego.

The lab welcomes Dr. Carlos Sánchez-León, a new post-doc.

The lab welcomes Michelle Wu, a new graduate student from the UCLA-Caltech MSTP.

Carlos and Will’s review on “Two-Photon Calcium Imaging of Neuronal Activity” appears in Nature Reviews Methods Primers.

Trish and Nazim were each awarded a BRI/Semel Institute Travel Award to attend the 2022 SfN meeting in San Diego. Congrats!

Zoë attends the Workshop on the Dynamic Brain at the Allen Institute (8/21 - 9/4).

Carlos presents at the FENS meeting in Paris as part of the Symposium entitled “The emergence of function in developing cortical circuits” organized by Oscar Marín.

Spectrum news does a piece on Nazim’s preprint about interneurons in Fragile X.

Trish receives a F31 NRSA from NICHD ("Cortico-amygdala circuit dysfunction underlying avoidance behaviors and aversive facial expressions to social touch in mouse models of autism").

Undergraduate student Sunny Mula was awarded the prestigious Whitcome Fellowship for Summer 2022 to conduct research in our lab.

Carlos gives his first research seminar in Spanish.

Our review on Cortical Interneurons in Autism came out in Nature Neuroscience.

Our new R01 on interneuron development received a score of 17 (3rd percentile). It's a collaboration with Anis Contractor at Northwestern.

Trish attended the Dynamic Brain Summer Course at the Allen Institute (Aug 21-Sept 5).

Undergraduate student David Chung participates in the prestigious Amgen Scholars research program.

Will Zeiger's paper on stroke plasticity comes out in Nature Communications. UCLA Health does a piece on it.

Congratulations to David Chung, who was featured on the UCLA Undergraduate Research Center STEM Spotlight for his recent presentation at the Harvard National Collegiate Research Conference.

Congratulations to Anne Tran, who presented her poster at the 2020 ABRCMS meeting and she received an award for Best Poster in the Neuroscience category.

Carlos co-organized the Interneuron Dysfunction in Autism meeting, together with Anis Contractor (Northwestern Univ.) and Iryna Ethell (UC Riverside)

Trish was awarded a pre-doctoral slot on the new NeuroTechnology T32 at UCLA, was also a recipient of the 2020-2021 ARCS Fellowship (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists).

Nazim, Anand, Trish and Zoë participate in the 2020 FRAXA Biotech Games. The team placed 11th (out of 39 teams)! Special thanks to Ben Liu from the Buonomano lab for helping out!

Zoë Dobler joins the lab as a Neuroscience IDP graduate student.

Will Zeiger starts his own lab as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at UCLA.

Carlos receives the 2020 UCLA Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.

The lab published two new papers; one is on the EZcalcium toolbox for analyzing calcium imaging data and the other is a collaboration with Bahram Jalali’s lab at UCLA.

Caliope is awarded the UCLA Dean’s Prize at Research Poster Day 2020.

This coming fall 2020, former lab undergrad Cindy Chen will be starting the PhD program in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, while current lab undergrad Brandon Nanfito will be starting in the Neuroscience PhD program at Johns Hopkins. We are so proud of them!

Brandon Nanfito receives the 2019 Lawrence Kruger undergraduate Research Scholarship for the work he did this past summer in the lab (also in the photo is Felix Schweizer, Interim Director of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute).

Anu Goel starts as Assistant Professor of Psychology at UC Riverside

Trishala Chari joins the lab as a Neuroscience IDP graduate student

Four of the lab’s undergraduate students graduated this year from UCLA (June 2019).  Couldn’t be prouder of this bunch.  Gunvant Chaudhari and Michael Le will attend medical school at UCSF and UCLA, respectively.  I have no doubt they will continue to be involved in research in the future. Cindy Chen will be taking a year off to work in the laboratory of Carolyn Houser at UCLA while she applies to PhD programs in Neuroscience. I have no doubt Cindy will make exciting and impactful discoveries in her PhD. Barbara Todisco is applying for various positions as she ponders whether to apply to medical school or pursue a different career that suits her many talents. Either way, she is going to make a difference in the world, no doubt about that.

Gunvant is awarded the UCLA Dean’s Prize at Research Poster Day 2019

Michael Le will go to UCLA for med-school in the Fall

Gunvant Chaudhari will go to UCSF for med-school in the Fall

Nazim received a fellowship grant from FRAXA

Chloe Dupuis joins the lab for a 6-month internship as part of her Masters in Nanoscale Engineering at the University Lyon, France

Three UCLA undergrads, Natalie Noble, Isa Samad, and David Chung, join the lab

Anu's preview of Dan Feldman’s paper on E/I balance in autism models comes out in Neuron

Erica’s paper on environmental enrichment comes out in The Journal of Neuroscience

SPECTRUM, the online magazine of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, does a piece on Anu’s paper

Two UCLA undergraduate students, Sandhya Murugan and Brandon Nanfito, join the lab

Anu’s paper on deficits in visual discrimination in Fragile X syndrome comes out in Nature Neuroscience. It gets a bit of press.

Cynthia's and Erica's methods paper on viral transduction of GCaMPs in the neonatal brain appears online.

Aditi Newadkar was selected to participate in the 22nd Annual Posters on the Hill event in Washington, D.C., on April 17-28, 2018. She is the first UCLA undergrad to do so since 2011

Congratulations to Anu, who had her baby boy, Taig!

Anouk Heuvelmans joins the lab for 9 months as part of her Masters thesis for the University of Amsterdam

Anu attended the Gordon Research Conference on Excitatory Synapses and Brain Functionin Les Diablerets, Switzerland

Lab awarded a 3-year Partnering-PI grant from the Department of Defense (DOD) for a collaboration with Dr. Anis Contractor at Northwestern

Aditi was chosen to participate in the prestigious 2017 summer research program at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Carl Petersen's lab

Gunvant was chosen as one of the five UCLA undergraduates to take part in the Summer 2017 UCLA Amgen Scholars Program

Two undergraduates, Michael Le and Barbara Todisco join the lab

Anu was the recipient of a FENS, IBRO-PERC and The Brain Prize stipend to attend theNew Approaches to Imaging Neurons and Neural Circuits Brain Conference in Copenhagen (April 17-20, 2016)

Steve Cohen is accepted to prestigious Janelia Undergraduate Scholars Program for the 2016 Summer to work with Dr. Adam Hantman

Two undergraduates, Michael Le and Barbara Todisco join the lab

Two undergraduates, Sheyda Mesgarzadeh and Aditi Newadkar, join the lab

Cynthia and Will receive 1st prize for best poster in the grad student and post-doc category at the UCLA Neurology Science Day

Steve Cohen was one of the five selected UCLA undergraduate students to participate in the Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Program for 2014-2017

Cynthia presented her work, Emerging Tools for Acquisition and Interpretation of Whole-Brain Functional Data, at the Janelia Farm Conference that took place on November 1-4, 2015.

Three UCLA undergraduate students joined the lab: Satvir Saggi, Mona Chatrizeh, and Steve Hernandez

Cynthia was awarded a F30 individual NRSA from the NINDS

Grant Higerd receives Dean's Prize at UCLA's Science Poster Day

Erica was selected to attend the "Advanced Techniques in Molecular Neuroscience" course at CSHL; http://www.cshl.edu.

Cynthia was selected to attend the workshop on Autism Spectrum Disorders at CSHL.

The lab receives a $120,000 grant from the Cal-Brain Seed Grant Program; http://cal-brain.org/content/abstract-carlos-portera-cailliau

Amaya’s paper on Layer 4 pyramidal neurons got accepted to The Journal of Neuroscience

Grant Higerd won 1st place for his poster during neurology and neurobiology science day

Also, Carlos won the Golden Test Tube award for his excellence as a teacher and mentor!

Amaya received Charles E. Sawyer travel award to present at 'Dendrites 2014' at FORTH in Crete, Greece

Grant Higerd (undergrad in the lab) was named Aademic All-American by the American Collegiate Rowing Association, and was a finalist (one of only 3!) for the 2014 UCLA Club Sports Varsity Athlete of the Year.  We are very proud.

Sahana Kribakaran (undergrad in the lab) was awarded a Dean’s Prize at UCLA's Science Poster Day on May 13 2014.

Carlos attends the Cosyne Symposium "Rogue States: Altered dynamics of neural circuit activity in brain disorders" organized by Cian O'Donell and Terry Sejnowsky at Snowbird Utah. We snapped this photo: Terry, Carlos, Karl, Ofer, Cian, and Tim

Lab receives new funding: a SFARI grant with Peyman Golshani as co-investigator (start date: February 2014) and a Department of Defense grant with my Anis Contractor at Northwestern as PI (start date: summer 2014). Both are to study circuit defects in Fragile X Syndrome.

Amaya had her baby boy Julen on January 5 2014.

Portera Lab reunion at SfN in San Diego: Carlos, Peyman, Tiago, Alberto, Ricardo (and Amaya) - Jessica, Mate, Erica, Tara

The Dana Foundation posted an interview with Carlos http://www.dana.org/media/detail.aspx?id=44526

Carlos was the MC of the UCLA Falling Walls Competition (October 3, 2013) http://falling-walls.com/

Dr. Mate Marosi, a new post-doc, started in the lab

The proposal for the renewal of our R01 on fragile X research gets a score of 20 (6th percentile)

Claire Huang, a student at Diamond Bar High School, joins the lab for the summer (June 2013). In the photo, she is 3rd from the left

Tiago's paper appears in Nature Neuroscience (June 2013) http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3415.html

The LA Times does a piece on it. http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-autism-mice-20130603,0,3096378.story

Cynthia was awarded a Soros Fellowship for the Class of 2013: http://www.pdsoros.org/current_fellows/#he

Ricardo's paper on Aging synapses appeared today in J Neurosci (Feb 27 2013) : http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/9/4094.full.pdf+html

Amaya was awarded 2 prizes at The Course in Molecular Anatomy at OIST (including 'Best Individual and Best Group Project'), Okinawa Japan

Our R21 proposal on Cajal-Retzius neurons (NIMH) and the stroke R01 (NINDS) will both be funded starting April 2013

Tiago's work on fragile X mice is featured on the SFARI website: http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/conference-news/2013/salk-institute-fondation-ipsen-nature-symposium-2013/fragile-x-mice-show-brain-wave-abnormalities-during-sleep

Ricardo's paper on long-term imaging of synaptic changes associated with normal aging is accepted at The Journal of Neuroscience

Adrian Cheng was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 as a Rising Star in Science & Health Care for his work on developing STEM in the lab. Congratulations to him!
http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/30-under-30/30-under-30_science.htm
http://www.alleninstitute.org/Media/documents/press_releases/2012_1217_PressRelease_ForbesAdrianCheng.html

Cynthia He (MSTP student) will join the lab in Summer 2013

Our R01 proposal on stroke gets score of 10 - in the 2nd percentile

Undergraduate student Sahana Kribakaran joins the lab

Amaya Miquelajauregui is awarded a grant from NARSAD

Joyce Wondolowski finishes a brief research stint in the lab and starts a post-doc at the University of Southern California

Erica Arroyo is awarded a T32 pre-doctoral fellowship from the Neurobehavioral Genetics Training Grant

Lauren Wierenga joins the lab for the summer as an AMGEN Scholar. Lauren is an undergraduate student from Kalamazooo College, MI

Daniel Cantu joins the lab for his PhD thesis

Erica Arroyo joins the lab for her PhD thesis

Daniel Cantu from ACCESS starts a rotation in the lab

Cynthia He's review on "The trouble with spines in fragile X syndrome" appears in Neuroscience

David Johnston's paper is accepted in Cerebral Cortex

David Johnston defends his thesis

Carlos is promoted to Associate Professor effective July 1 2012

Erica Arroyo from ACCESS starts a rotation in the lab

Alberto Cruz' paper on spines in slices is published in PLoS One