Shawn Bates is a current Fellow in the 2018–2020 class of SfN’s Neuroscience Scholars Program. Bates received his PhD in neuroscience from Texas A&M University in 2017. His interests include higher learning and research that is focused on how environmental factors, like stress, can contribute to addiction.

Zachary Pennington, PhD, is an instructor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He completed his bachelor's degree in psychology at UCLA, followed by a PhD in behavioral neuroscience at UCLA under the supervision of Michael Fanselow. For his postdoctoral fellowship, he joined the laboratory of Denise Cai, where he has developed and utilized a range of open-source imaging technologies to understand how stress alters neural circuits. His research focus is on understanding how stress results in lasting alterations in neural circuits, predisposing individuals to mental health conditions.

Yosif (Joe) Zaki, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at NYU. He received his BS in behavioral neuroscience with a minor in computer science from Northeastern University in 2018. He received his PhD in neuroscience from Mount Sinai in 2024, where he investigated the neurobiological basis of memory integration across time. He has spent the past 10 years studying how memories are dynamically formed, stored, and updated across time.

Denise J. Cai, PhD, is a neuroscientist and associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She completed her PhD in experimental psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles. Her lab at Mount Sinai focuses on how memories are both stable enough to last a lifetime, but flexible enough to update with new experiences, using cutting-edge tools (like in vivo calcium imaging, optogenetics, chemogenetics). Her team has shown that memory ensembles aren’t fixed snapshots, but dynamic networks that constantly link and reshape our past experiences. Cai is also passionate about making neuroscience accessible and co-developed the Miniscope platform and other open-source tools now used by hundreds of labs around the world, helping the field push forward faster and more collaboratively.