Dr. Martha Bagnall
After undergraduate studies at Yale, Dr. Martha Bagnall joined Tom Carew’s lab in UC Irvine as a technician for two years, studying sensorimotor learning. During graduate school in neuroscience at UC San Diego, she worked with Sascha du Lac at the Salk Institute. There she studied intrinsic, synaptic, and circuit function in the mouse vestibular brainstem and cerebellum. During a postdoctoral position with Massimo Scanziani, she mapped the thalamic projection to inhibitory neurons in barrel cortex. Next, with David McLean at Northwestern University, she found that the spinal circuit in zebrafish contains parallel but distinct premotor pathways for independent control of dorsal and ventral musculature.
Alaina Bertram
Research Technician II
Chunqi (Zoe) Tian
Graduate Student
Qianyao Sun
Graduate Student
Qianyao received his BS in life sciences from Tsinghua University, where he studied mice cerebellar circuits in Dr. Mu Zhou’s lab. After an internship studying Drosophila oviposition circuits in Dr. Fei Wang’s lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qianyao decided to try a new exciting model organism — zebrafish. In the Bagnall Lab, he investigates the role of neuromodulators in spinal cord circuits. Fun fact: Qianyao loves volleyball and plays for the WashU volleyball club.
Maria Paula Puerto Fals
Graduate Student
Dr. Katarzyna Piekarz
Postdoctoral Scholar
Katarzyna received her master’s in biotechnology from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She first came to the U.S. for a Fulbright program to work as a research trainee at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and then stayed to pursue her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Her doctoral work was at the intersection of neuroscience and biology of aging as she researched how to prevent alpha motor neuron loss in aging and neurodegenerative diseases (ALS).
She has worked with cell cultures, yeast, mice, fruit flies, Caenorhabditis elegans and Ciona intestinalis (during her first postdoctoral position in the Stolfi Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology). Now, she has turned her attention to experiments in silico, and in the Bagnall Lab, she is focusing on neural modeling of spinal cord circuits in zebrafish.
Dr. Keng-Hung Shen
Postdoctoral Scholar
Keng-Hung set out to become a physiatrist and received his MD from National Taiwan University, but his curiosity about movement control had other plans. This led him to the University of Texas at Austin, where he completed his PhD studying the biomechanics of balance control during walking in individuals who have had a stroke. Fascinated by how biological systems solve the complex mechanical challenges of locomotion, he was drawn to the Bagnall Lab to investigate how spinal neurons, muscles and body dynamics come together to produce movement — specifically, how zebrafish swim.
Alumni Lab Members
Dr. Rebecca Callahan
Rebecca came to us via the wonderful world of photovoltaics. She kicked all sorts of “you know what” at Hendrix College and again at University of Colorado – Boulder, where she was an NSF Graduate Student Fellow under the supervision of Prof. David Walba and Dr. Garry Rumbles.
Jeff Elsner
Jeff Elsner is a San Diego native and WashU undergraduate — the type that every faculty member wishes would come into their office during recruitment interviews. He is now off to med school to make America well again.
Katherine Heisey
Katherine Heisey was an undergraduate at UIC and came to us from Argonne National Labs. She carried out early graduate work on cerebellar inputs to vestibular neurons.
Zhikai Liu
Zhikai Liu is from Jinggang Shan in the Jiangxi province of China. He went to Tsinghua University in Beijing for undergrad where he studied the structural biology of viruses in Xiang Ye’s lab. After a short summer internship in Stephen Liberles’ lab at Harvard, his research interests shifted to the neuroscience underlying the question: “Which way is up?”
Rich Roberts
Rich Roberts received his BA from Oberlin College and PhD from Duke University. While at Duke he worked towards understanding the genetic basis of behavior. He studied olfaction under the mentorship of Hiro Matsunami and continued this line of interest with post doctoral work in Tim Holy’s lab at WashU. Wowed by the opportunities present in the righting reflex regulated by a small number of neurons in the larval zebrafish brain he moved all of two labs down the hall.
Saul Bello Rojas
Saul received his BA in neuroscience from Lake Forest College. Like Martha, he worked at Northwestern University under David McLean, mapping motor neuron innervation in zebrafish. His interest in motor control and zebrafish brought him to the Bagnall Lab, where he investigated how input to descending projections affects locomotor output. He’s truly a “chip off the old block.”
Dr. Mohini Sengupta
Mohini received her Master’s in Biotechnology from St. Xaviers College, Kolkata and her PhD from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS, Bangalore). For her graduate work, she studied the intrinsic and network properties of zebrafish cerebellar Purkinje neurons with Dr. Vatsala Thirumalai. In the Bagnall Lab, she used lasers and very small things as she worked toward illuminating how spinal circuits are assembled; both in terms of specific connectivity as well as function.