People

Celina graduated from the University of San Diego with a B.A. in Behavioral Neuroscience and a minor in Philosophy before she obtained her M.S. in Neuroimaging and Informatics from the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. With over three years of experience in multimodal neuroimaging analysis at Keck’s Laboratory of Neuroimaging, her research in the ALBA Lab will focus on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) analysis in collaboration with the Biomagnetic Imaging Lab to study language and neurodegeneration.

Nilgoun /'ni:lgʊn/ is a postdoctoral research scholar in the ALBA lab, working primarily on the Dyslexia Project. She holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford (Brain, Speech, and Language Lab), and a clinical Master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Toronto, where she completed her clinical residency at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids).

Maya graduated from Middlebury College in 2024 with a B.A. in neuroscience and a minor in art history. During her time at Middlebury, she contributed to a research project investigating gender and sex differences in visuospatial abilities among children using the JLAP task. Maya also spent a summer as a research assistant in the Hammack Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Vermont, where she studied the neurobiological underpinning of anxiety-like and depression-like behaviors.

Nicoletta holds a Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences and Education from the University of Trento and a Master’s in Linguistics and Cognitive Studies from the University of Siena. Her research bridges theoretical linguistics and cognitive neuroscience to investigate how linguistic information is processed in the brain across different populations, including healthy and brain-injured monolingual and bilingual adults, using methods such as eye-tracking, EEG, and neuroimaging.

Melina Flores has worked in healthcare for over 15 years. She received a bachelor’s degree in Healthcare Management in 2015 and found working in the healthcare industry to be her passion, allowing her to nurture her desire to help others.

Chiara earned her MD from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, where she is currently completing her residency in Neurology. As a visiting scholar at UCSF, her research focuses on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA), with a particular interest in semantic dementia. During her six-month stay, she will contribute to ongoing projects exploring the neuroanatomical and clinical features of neurodegenerative language disorders.

Sarah Inkelis is an assistant professor at the UCSF Dyslexia Center. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology at the SDSU/UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program and completed her internship in pediatric neuropsychology at the UCLA Semel Institute. Her research at UCSF will focus on understanding the phenotype of dyslexia across the lifespan.

Robin Irey is an educational research specialist at the UCSF Dyslexia Center. She earned a PhD in Special Education from the UCB/SFSU joint doctoral program and previously earned a Master's and Teaching Credential from USF. Her research interests are informed by her previous experience as a special education classroom teacher and include early reading acquisition and development, reading intervention, metalinguistic underpinnings of reading, cognitive processes of reading, morphological awareness, and assessment.

Willa is a speech-language pathologist at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in the ALBA Language Neurobiology Lab. Willa has a BA degree in Psychology from Lewis & Clark College and an MA degree in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Texas at Austin. She conducts diagnostic speech and language assessments for research participants at the ALBA Lab, and she also provides speech and language therapy for patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) in collaboration with the Aphasia Research and Treatment Lab (ARTLab) at the University of Texas at Austin.