Dear students and colleagues,
We have shown in 2025 that even faced with anti-science sentiments and funding uncertainty, we have continued not only to excel scientifically but also to stay true to our humanistic and community values. Let’s celebrate all our achievements.
In 2025, our students received multiple fellowships and prizes. Atesha Sahagun and Dario Tommasini were both awarded the very competitive NIH doctoral fellowships (F31s). Jessica Gustin-Murray received an NSF GRFP. Odilia Lu is a continuing Alper Fellow this year and received the NINDS Early-Career Rigor Champions Prize. Angel Garcia was awarded the HHMI Gilliam Fellowship. In 2025 alone, our students co-authored 20 scientific papers. It is not surprising to see that our program ranks sixth nationwide (US News). Our students also played an important role teaching and designing our new undergraduate courses in Neuroscience. Our new major is rapidly becoming popular among aspiring undergraduate biologists, and your participation and enthusiasm was a key factor in this success. Congratulations to Caroline He and Eric Hu for winning the Outstanding GSI awards.
We will miss our outstanding recent graduates. In 2025, we awarded 12 PhDs: Karina Bistrong, Julia Bleier, Leana King, Christopher Kymn, Amanda LeBel, Samira Maboudian, Sonali Mali, Emily Meschke, Benjamin Parker, Lucia Rodriguez, Brooke Staveland, and Kaeli Vandemark. Congratulations doctors! (Dissertation titles here).
Some of our graduates at spring 2025 commencement. Photo by GradImages.
Neuroscience PhD Program entering class of 2025. Photo by Shoey Sindel.
And we welcomed our 2025 cohort: Jason Miller, Sam Reifenstein, India Carter, William Liu, Stefan Hajduk, Natalia Stone, and Taylor Li. They were joined by Leah Du, Jianing Mu, Nilay Agarwal and Suna Guo who came from the University of Texas with our new faculty recruits Liberty Hamilton and Alex Huth. They are off to a good start. India Carter was awarded the Chancellor's Fellowship, Stefan Hajduk was awarded the Curci Scholarship, and Nilay Agarwal and Leah Du were both awarded the Berkeley Fellowship.
We, the neuroscience community, are proud of our PhD program but we also work hard to maintain its excellence and to continue to improve it. While the national mood in science has driven other Universities to reduce their class size, we have maintained our commitment to graduate education. Not only are we planning on maintaining our future class sizes to the same number, but the neuroscience faculty will also grow; in 2026, we will hopefully expand in the areas of cellular and molecular neuroscience and molecular therapeutics. In the longer term, we are also planning to grow in the area of computational neuroscience, broadly defined. We are also planning on implementing measures to improve the Mentor-mentee relationship and improve the training experience of our students. Finally, we have embarked on an overhaul of our graduate curriculum and, for this process, will continue to reach out to you for new ideas and feedback to our proposals.
Our program would also not be the same without the hard work and dedication of our outstanding program manager, Leleña Avila, and program coordinator, Peony Yu. I know that we all appreciate their commitment and that we cannot thank them enough on a day-to-day basis. Thank you Leleña and Peony for 2025 and looking forward to working with you in 2026!
We are again celebrating the Lunar New Year: 2026 is the year of the Fire Horse. The Fire Horse symbolizes independence, energy and intelligence; all traits that are essential for success in science. Let’s combine those traits with Berkeley’s spirit of collaboration and support and we will continue to advance knowledge and make the world a better place.
Frédéric Theunissen