People

Bence P Ölveczky

olveczky@fas.harvard.edu

Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Principal Investigator

Research and Professional Experience 2016-present Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University 2012-2016 John L. Loeb Associate Professor in the Natural Sciences, Harvard University 2007-2012 Assistant Professor, Harvard University...

Cheshta Bhatia

cheshtabhatia@g.harvard.edu

Graduate student

I’m a first year graduate student in the department of organismic and evolutionary biology. I did my undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali, India. In my master’s thesis project with the University of...

Lily Cao

lilycao@fas.harvard.edu

Research assistant

Lily studied math at the University of Florida, where she examined the role of the ventral hippocampus in decision making. At the Ölveczky lab, she is interested in social behavior, particularly in the context of ASD.

Rudy Gelb-Bicknell

gelb-bicknell@fas.harvard.edu

Senior Research Scientist

Rudy Gelb-Bicknell studied Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, concentrating in signal processing and computational neuroscience. Before joining the Olveczky Lab, he worked as a Research Engineer at Boston Scientific, studying...

Kiah Hardcastle

kiahhardcastle@gmail.com

Postdoctoral Fellow

PhD student with Lisa Giocomo and Surya Ganguli at Stanford

Kiah Hardcastle is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab. As a PhD student with Lisa Giocomo and Surya Ganguli at Stanford, she used in vivo electrophysiology and computational models to study how neurons in the medial entorhinal cortex encode navigationally...

Naama Kadmon Harpaz

naamakadmon@gmail.com

Postdoctoral Fellow (Helen Hay Whitney fellowship)

PhD in Life Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), 2017

MSc in Life Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), 2012

Naama completed her PhD with Prof. Tamar Flash at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she studied invariant properties of movement execution and their underlying representation in the...

Ugne Klibaite

klibaite@fas.harvard.edu

Postdoctoral Fellow (MBB Fellowship)

PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology, Princeton University, 2018

BS in Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, 2013

Ugne is a postdoctoral fellow in the Ölveczky and Pehlevan groups. She obtained her doctorate in Quantitative and Computational Biology at Princeton with Joshua Shaevitz, where she studied the structure of social behavior in fruit flies. She is currently...

Chia-Wei Liu

chiawei_liu@fas.harvard.edu

Chia-Wei received his Master’s degree from National Taiwan University, where he studied the frequency-coding mechanism of the cerebellum in essential tremor and rhythmic movements using in vivo electrophysiology and optogenetics. In the Ölveczky Lab, he...

Meri Petollari

meripetollari@fas.harvard.edu

Faculty Administrator

Hannah Phillips

hannahphillips@fas.harvard.edu

Postdoctoral Fellow

PhD in Neuroscience, State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University

BS in Neuroscience, Allegheny College

I obtained my PhD in Neuroscience at SUNY Upstate Medical University with Wei-Dong Yao, where I studied the prefrontal neurophysiological mechanisms underlying loss of empathy in a mouse model of C9ORF72-associated behavioral-variant frontotemporal...

Mahdiyar Shahbazi

mshahbazi@g.harvard.edu

Graduate Student

Mahdiyar obtained his BSc in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University in Iran. He then continued his studies at Western University in Canada, where he received my MSc in Neuroscience. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Ölveczky Lab. His research...

Yutaka Sprague

Graduate Student

Yutaka is PhD student in the Program in Neuroscience. Previously, they received a BS in Computer Science and Neuroscience at Duke University and worked as a research assistant at UCSF. Their previous research experiences with John Pearson at Duke and Saul...