Westbrook Lab: Members
The Westbrook Lab currently has seven members. If you are interested in joining the lab, please contact Gary Westbrook at the address listed on the lab home page.
Gary L. Westbrook
MSE, MD, Case Western Reserve, 1976
Dr. Westbrook received clinical training in Internal Medicine and Neurology in Boston and St. Louis, and research training at the National Institutes of Health. He is Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Vollum Institute and the Dixon Professor of Neurology at OHSU. His research interests are the mechanisms of synaptic transmission in the nervous system. Dr. Westbrook has been active in OHSU training activities in disease-oriented neuroscience research. He initiated the Neurobiology of Disease course in the graduate program, and currently serves as the Director of the Neuroscience Graduate Program at OHSU.
AeSoon Bensen
BS, Humboldt State, 2002
AeSoon is a senior research assistant who joined the lab in 2004 and previously worked at OHSU's West Campus. AeSoon provides invaluable molecular biology support for our projects and helps manage the transgenic mouse colonies. She also asks tough questions in lab meetings to keep everyone on their toes! Outside work, AeSoon has started her own small business, designing laptop bags for women.
Maria Borisovska
BS, MS, Instititute of Physics and Technology, Kiev, 2002
PhD, University of Saarland, Homburg, Germany, 2006
Maria joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in 2008. Her graduate work examined the role of the vesicular SNARE proteins synaptobrevin II and cellubrevin in exocytosis of chromaffin cells. Currently, Maria is working on glomerular function in the olfactory bulb using electrophysiological methods. She is focusing on the role of dopamine-secreting periglomerular cells in the glomerulus using cell-labeling methods to identify this class of neurons and voltammetry to measure dopamine release.
Christina Chatzi
PhD, University of Aberdeen, UK, 2007
Christina joined the Westbrook lab in October 2011 from the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California. She brings a strong background in developmental biology and stem cell biology that will greatly enhance the group.
Julia Perederiy
BA, University of California, Berkeley, 2003
Julia is a 4th year student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at OHSU. She worked as a lab assistant at UCLA from 2005-2007 after completing her undergraduate degree in psychology and neurobiology at UC Berkeley. At UCLA, Julia worked on a project examining the genes involved in language development. She is currently examining how newborn neurons respond in a classic model of neural injury, a lesion to the entorhinal cortex. This lesion removes a major input to the dentate gyrus hippocampus, and we expect that it will provide molecular insights about how newborn neurons may compensate for loss of the normal circuit organization, and thus provide a model for repair of neuronal circuits by newborn neurons or stem cells.
Eric Schnell
MD, PhD, University of California, San Francisco, 2004
Eric is an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology who performs his clinical work at the Portland VA and is working on his research as part of the Westbrook lab. Eric is interested in adult-generated newborn neurons and their role in neuroplasticity in the brain, with a particular interest in the synaptogenic molecules, neuroligins, as well as the cellular and network effects of concussive head injuries.
Ken Tovar
BA, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1990
PhD, Oregon Health & Science University, 2001
Ken is a senior postdoctoral fellow who returned to our lab after postdoctoral fellowships at Washington University in St. Louis and at OHSU’s West Campus. In his graduate research, Ken’s work established the distinct subtypes of NMDA receptors that are expressed at excitatory synapses as synapses form and mature. Ken is using autaptic hippocampal cell cultures to examine the properties of single synapses using electrophysiological methods.
Eric Washburn
BS, Portland State University, 2008
Eric is the only member of the lab that has been pictured in the New York Times, creating a lot of intra-lab jealousy! Eric was seen commuting on his bike to the lab, doing his part to reduce the carbon footprint. Most recently he completed an ultramarathon (on a day he was not scheduled to work). Eric is an expert on the production of the replication-defective viral particles that we use to alter the molecular expression in neurons in the adult nervous system. He also runs the Vollum Viral Core. Eric joined the lab in 2007 as a Senior Research Assistant after working in a lab at OHSU's West Campus for several years.
