Reza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at UCSF. He is a core faculty member at the UCSF Neuroscape Center, a Weill Neurohub Investigator, and the Director of Data Analytics at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neuroscience. He is a core member of the UC Berkeley/UCSF Bioengineering and Computational Precision Health graduate programs and the UCSF Neuroscience and Biomedical Informatics graduate programs. Before joining UCSF, Reza was a scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He completed his PhD and MSc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in 2018, where he developed interpretable machine learning tools with applications in computational neuroscience. Reza received his MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2013 and BSc in Electrical Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in 2010.

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Rahul is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Abbasi Lab in UCSF Neurology. Prior to this, he completed his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, based at the NeuroAI Lab there. His research interests are in Computational Neuroscience, Causal Inference, Machine Learning, and Data-driven Time Series Analysis. His doctoral research focuses on inferring the causal pathway of information flow in the brain from brain signals. Prior to doctoral studies, he completed MS in Statistics from the University of Washington, Seattle, and Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

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Aditya is a postdoctoral scholar in the Abbasi Lab as part of the UCSF Department of Neurology. Prior to this, he completed his PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh under the mentorship of Dr. Hyun Jung Park. His research interests are in causal inference, machine learning interpretability, multiomics-focused algorithmic development, and neurodegenerative disease. Aditya’s doctoral research interests focused on decomposing risk into stratified components, SHAP-based nonlinear causal effect identification in diverse patient cohorts, and interpretability of single cell foundation models with regard to in silico perturb-seq experiments. Prior to his PhD, he completed his M.S. in Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Washington, Seattle and his B.S. in Genetics and Genomics from the University of California, Davis. Away from the lab, Aditya loves to play basketball, tennis, piano, drums, and try out as many new coffee spots as possible.

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Gavin is a PhD student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF joint Bioengineering program. His project in the lab is focused on building computational platforms to analyze imaging and genomics data in Multiple Sclerosis. Before joining to the program, Gavin was an undergraduate researcher at McGill University, where he generated MRI-based simulations of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. Gavin’s background in Neuroscience and Medical Imaging prompts him to explore projects that apply machine learning methods for predicting neurological disorder prognosis.

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Russell is a PhD student in the UC Berkeley–UCSF Joint Bioengineering program. His research focuses on machine learning for healthcare, with particular interests in clinical decision support and personalized health forecasting. He is currently developing methods for applying AI to patient stratification and treatment planning, and works on deploying interpretable, real-world AI systems in collaboration with clinicians. Before graduate school, Russell studied bioengineering at UC San Diego, where he researched neural plasticity in stroke recovery. He also worked at Novartis, building automated systems for high-throughput drug screening. In his free time, he enjoys bricking mid-range jumpers in pickup basketball, pretending the V4s at the gym are “just reachy,” and drinking too much boba.

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Naomi is a PhD student in the Neuroscience program at UCSF. She is interested in developing neural network models based on the visual cortex. Previously, Naomi spent her undergrad at Hopkins and studied the impact of hearing loss on the auditory cortex of mice. She also spent a summer at the Blue Brain Project, implementing a model of thalamocortical projections to the barrel cortex. In her free time, she enjoys running, trying new foods, and sitting in the sun outside.

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Soodabeh (Soo) Ghaffari is a Ph.D. student in the UC Berkeley–UCSF Joint Graduate Program in Bioengineering, where she works on machine learning for biomedical data, with a focus on brain aging and clinical natural language processing. She trained as a chemical engineer at Penn State, where she worked on AI for protein design, and at Sharif University of Technology, where she focused on mathematical modeling and process control. Before starting her Ph.D., she worked on machine-learning–guided antibiotic discovery at Princeton University. As a UC Noyce Fellow in Computational Health, she builds benchmarks and interaction-aware interpretability methods to keep medical AI trustworthy on noisy clinical text, with the goal of scalable, clinician-auditable mental health monitoring across the UC Health system. Outside the lab, she runs, hikes, reads poetry, and practices calligraphy.

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Sara is a Ph.D. student in Biological and Medical Informatics at UCSF, where she focuses on machine-learning methods for spatial transcriptomics and multimodal data integration to define precancerous niches. Before graduate school, Sara spent two years as a Rotational Associate at Pfizer Oncology Research & Development, working across computational chemistry, machine learning, computational biology, and flow cytometry. She earned her B.S. in Computer Science with a second major in Biology (Computational Biology & Genomics track) from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was an Amgen Scholar and developed machine learning interpretation methods to uncover regulatory sequence syntax. Outside the lab, Sara plays soccer, rock climbs, and surfs, albeit badly.

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Former Core Members

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Rob Cahill, Research Specialist
Currently: Co-Founder and President at Junevity

Neelroop Parikshak, Neurology Resident
Currently: Director, Neurology, Therapeutic Area Genetics at Regeneron

Roozbeh Farhoodi, Postdoctoral scholar
Currently: Software Engineer, Google

Jennifer Townsend, Research Data Scientist
Currently: National University of Natural Medicine

Maria Olaru, PhD Student
Currently: Data Science Manager, Whoop

Arefeh Sherafati, Postdoctoral Scholar
Currently: Scientist, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

Maxine Levesque, PhD Student
Currently: Scientist, Astera Institute

Vincent Wang, Research Specialist
Senior Engineer, Wētā FX

Kara Presbrey, PhD Student

Patrick Xian, Postdoctoral Scholar
Currently: Northeastern University

Alex Lee, PhD Candidate, Bioinformatics
Currently: Machine Learning Researcher, Calico Life Sciences

Interns and Visiting Scholars

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Aditya Behal

Alma Dubuc

Undergraduate Researchers

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Shiladitya Dutta

Austin Jang

Gaurav Ghosal

Zeyu Yun

Chirag Sharma

Meera Mehta

Anmol Parande

Franklin Heng

Ahyeon Hwang

Kevin Chen

Arbaaz Muslim

Rohan Divate

Daniel Deng

Agam Gupta

Alex Wang

Anirudh Natarajan

Anjani Pangal

Ankita Janakiraman

Anni Chai

Annie Ouyang

Anvitha Kachinthaya

Aryan Goyal

Ashwin Bardhwaj

Ayda Nayeb Nazar

Bakar Haghighi

Bella Zhang

Bhavesh Kalisetti

Brian Liu

Can Jozef Saul

Divya Parimi

Esther Cai

Huibo Yang

Kashyap Murali

Kaushik Singh

Kevin Chen

Khoa Pham

Lan Wu

Ojas Karnavat

Pradeep Muthaiya

Pranav Vaidhyanathan

Raymond Zhao

Richard Shuai

Ryan Jia

Sanjit Rao

Satvik Lolla

Carolyn Pyun

Join us!

We have several openings for post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students and software developers. Contact Reza directly at Reza.AbbasiAsl@ucsf.edu to learn more!