Simons Society of Fellows: People

Begüm Aydin is a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Mucosal Immunology at the Rockefeller University, working with Dr. Daniel Mucida. She received her Ph.D. from New York University and her B.S. from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. In her doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Esteban Mazzoni, Aydin studied how proneural transcription factors specify neuronal fate.

Philipp Brand is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Vanessa Ruta at the Rockefeller University. He holds a B.S. in biology and an M.S. in genetics and evolution from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, and a Ph.D. in population biology from the University of California, Davis.

Michele Fornea will be joining the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University as a postdoctoral fellow after a year at Princeton with Professor Christopher Skinner. Fornea completed his Ph.D. at McGill University under the guidance of professors Henri Darmon and Adrian Iovita.

Leah Houri-Zeevi is a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the department of neurobiology at Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Dr. Oded Rechavi. Her graduate work focused on understanding the rules of transgenerational inheritance of non-DNA-based information.

Patrick Kennedy is a postdoctoral researcher studying the evolution of animal social behavior. Starting in January 2021, he will be based at Columbia University, working with Dr. Dustin Rubenstein. He will be focusing on ecological and climatic drivers of social insect cooperation, supported by the Simons Junior Fellowship and a Marie Curie Global Fellowship, using theoretical models and field experiments with African wasps.

Emily Mackevicius is currently a postdoctoral neuroscientist at Columbia University in the lab of Professor Dmitriy Aronov. She received her B.S. in mathematics at the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at MIT, in the lab of Professor Michale Fee. Her research investigates what learning mechanisms in the brain give us the power to form and use memories.

Songtian Sonia Zhang will be joining the Department of Physics at Columbia University as a postdoctoral research fellow in Professor Dmitri Basov’s group. Zhang obtained her bachelor’s in physics at the University of Waterloo and her Ph.D. from the Princeton University physics department under Professor Zahid Hasan. Zhang was also awarded the Kusaka Memorial Prize by this department for outstanding performance in research and professional promise.