Dr. Robert Hawkins is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to flexibly communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with one another in social interactions. He received his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 2019 and was a C.V. Starr Fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute prior to starting as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stanford in 2024.

Dr. Luis Hernández-Núñez's lab seeks to uncover the fundamental principles of brain–body communication and whole-organism homeostasis. They combine genetics, optical physiology, systems neuroscience, engineering, and computational modeling to reveal how neural circuits across the body coordinate physiology and behavior.

With a primary focus on high-dimensional data, Dr. Mohammad Shahrokh Esfahani has significant expertise in developing machine learning tools. Much of his work involves constructing Bayesian models, which effectively convert 'prior knowledge', either inherent in the dataset or obtained from external sources, into mathematical terms—more specifically, prior probabilities.

Dr. Li Wang is a developmental neurobiologist with interdisciplinary training in genomics, proteomics, and neuroscience. His research seeks to understand how cellular and synaptic diversity arises during human brain development and evolution, and how these same mechanisms may be hijacked in diseases such as brain cancer.

Dr. Asiri Ediriwickrema, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. His clinical focus is on the diagnosis, evaluation, and management of patients with myelodysplastic neoplasms and clonal hematopoiesis. 

The brain is a fascinatingly complex and delicate system of biomolecules, cells, and dynamic interactions that must be carefully maintained to support human health. When this balance is disrupted, disease can arise. Neurodegenerative dementias including Alzheimer’s disease are highly prevalent and profoundly devastating, yet remain largely untreatable or incurable.

Dr. Meg Cychosz investigates how infants and children develop speech and language, including children with hearing differences and multilingual learners. Her research bridges linguistics, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and electrical engineering to understand fundamental questions about language acquisition. Her interdisciplinary approach combines fieldwork with computational methods, using deep learning and automatic speech recognition tools to analyze naturalistic speech recordings from children's daily lives.

Dr. Biafra Ahanonu, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine. He studies the neural coding and molecular mechanisms that generate specific pain percepts and behaviors via sensorimotor transformations and how the disease or therapies alter the peripheral and central nervous systems.

Plants are increasingly vulnerable to environmental stressors—such as pathogen infection, drought, and heat—from climate change. These challenges threaten global food security and limit the carbon sequestration potential of plants. Dr. Ellen Rim's research goal is to sustainably enhance plant productivity and resilience through protein engineering. The Rim lab engineers proteins involved in plant immune and hormone signaling pathways using directed evolution in high-throughput single cell systems.