Alvin Adjei joins the lab as a new research associate!

The Bender lab is excited to welcome Alvin as a new research associate! He previously hails from Harvard where he helped build assistive devices to conquer mobility challenges. 

Alina Hebling, Amanda Stark, and Barbara Shvareva join the lab!

The Bender lab grows with the addition of three new graduate students!  Check out "Lab Members" to learn more about them and their exciting research interests!   

New Preprint from Ryan Alexander

Ryan's first first-author work is now available on bioRxiv. In it, he describes new mechanisms for regulation of different streams of inhibitory input in prefrontal cortex. Read the preprint here.  

Katie and Sunrae win awards at the FamilieSCN2A annual meeting

Congrats to Katie Salvati for being chosen as the receipient of the Action Potential Basic Science Grant and to Sunrae Taloma for being awarded "best poster" at the FamilieSCN2A Foundation meeting. Kevin is a proud PI.

Ying awarded a grant from the Weill Institute

Congrats to Ying Li, MD PhD, for being selected for a Weill Award Clinician-Scientists in the Neurosciences!  Ying is investigating how antipsychotics act the cellular and circuit level in limbic systems, and their interactions with dopaminergic and GABAergic systems.

New collaborative preprint with Whistler Lab

Dopamine receptors are really interesting. They're targets for most commonly administered second generation antipsychotics (SGAs), and the canon has been that block of dopamine receptor-dependent signaling is the primary way in which SGAs help with neuropsychiatric symptoms. But here, by examining...

Sunrae Taloma joins the lab!

It's a pleasure to welcome our newest grad student, Sunrae Taloma, to the lab, where she's already digging into her project on sodium channel function and dysfunction using rat model systems. Sunrae holds the distinct honor of being so good at the rig that Kevin relented on his rule of "no quartz...

Preprint of collaborative project with Jenkins Lab posted.

Sodium channels are scaffolded to neuronal membranes by ankyrins. While there has been quite a lot of research on interactions between sodium channels and ankyrins in axons, far less attention has been paid to how sodium channels are anchored to dendritic compartments.

Preprint on CRISPRa approach to rescue SCN2A haploinsufficiency posted

Autism-associated variants in the gene SCN2A commonly impair gene function. This leads to haploinsufficiency, where a single functional copy cannot compensate for the loss of its partner. Here, Serena Tamura, a recently-graduated student in the Ahituv lab at UCSF, worked with us to test whether...

Andrew is awarded a fellowship from NIMH!

Congratulations to Dr. Andrew Nelson, who just received word that his F32 has been awarded!  Andrew is studying potential points of convergence across genes implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders.