Research by Graduate Students
Current PhD students and research active MS students.
| Shakila Behzadi | Shakila is interested in computational, biophysical, and cellular neurobiology. She is current laboratory technician in the Severi lab and previously worked in SARS-CoV-2 research. | |
| Gianpiero Fiorentino | Gianpiero is a Colombian Ph.D. candidate interested in biogeography, systematics, and evolutionary relationships in ants. He completed his undergraduate degree at the National University of Colombia, studying the patterns of biodiversity of Neotropical ants using systematics and taxonomy. Following his undergraduate career, Gianpiero has worked as an assistant curator at the Institute of Natural Sciences, a research assistant with the Insects of Colombia, and as a collaborative researcher with Escuela Superior Politecnica del Chimborazo (ESPOCH) and the Charles Darwin Research Station. There, he is working on studying the effects of Biological invasion on island ecosystems in the Galapagos. Gianpiero is a proud Latino and is currently leading an initiative in Colombia focused on engaging scientific learning in rural indigenous communities in the Amazon and the Pacific. He is a Co-founder of the Neotropical ants study group (GEHN), an outreach initiative that looks to give visibility to up-and-coming Latin American researchers. GEHN provides young researchers looking to enter academia with the chance to participate in weekly talks and science communication meetings. With his passion for teaching, he hopes to one day become a university professor and continue working towards encouraging diversity and inclusion in STEM. |
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| Elias Joseph | Elias brings a passion for marine invertebrates and scientific accessibility. They have worked on tardigrades, cnidarians, and microbes using a variety of molecular and imaging techniques and recently received an Honorable Mention for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. | |
| Roxanna Nadim | Roxy is interested in interested in the intersection of behavior, communication, and decision-making in social organisms. As an undergraduate and laboratory technician, she worked on neuroscience and comparative anatomy in vertebrate systems. | |
| Jonathan Trinidad | Jonathan is a PhD candidate with Professor Golowasch. He works on identifying the molecular pathways that govern coregulation of ion channels in neurons. Using bioinformatic tools and patch clamp experiments, Jonathan hope to understand how neurons regulate their highly variable combinations of parameters to exhibit characteristic electrophysiological activity. |
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| Yinghui Wang | Yinghui’s passion is rooted in marine animals, particularly invertebrates; as an undergraduate she contributed to work on copepod evolution and comparative genetics in arthropod vision. At NJIT she will focus on Ctenophores. | |
| Amani Webber-Schultz | Amani is a PhD candidate in the Flammang Lab studying shark functional morphology and swimming kinematics. She is particularly interested in how their scale morphology changes fluid flow around their body. |
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| Brandon Winick | Brandon is broadly interested in neuroscience, especially as it relates to behavior, locomotion, and neuronal adaptation. He joins NJIT after working in industry at Azenta Life Sciences with a recent focus on next-generation transcriptomic sequencing. |