Group

Jon Kleen

Principal Investigator  |  Lip-Bu Tan Endowed Professor  |  UCSF Chen Scholar

Jon is originally from rural Minnesota. He earned a PhD from Dartmouth College studying neuroscience, engineering, and computer science, followed by his MD from Dartmouth Medical School. At UCSF, he completed a residency in neurology, clinical fellowship in epilepsy, and postdoctoral training in human neurophysiology research. He is both a physician and a scientist in the Department of Neurology, Division of Epilepsy, and UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences.

Da Zhang

Da is a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF who received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Miami under the mentorship of Professor Mansur R. Kabuka. During her Ph.D., she studied deep representation learning for biological networks and uncovered hidden patterns in sequential data. Her current research uses machine-learning and deep-learning-based methods to understand the semantic basis of neural signals.

David Caldwell

David is a neurosurgery resident at UCSF who received his BSE and MSE in biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, and subsequently his MD and PhD in bioengineering at the University of Washington. His PhD work was focused on engineering direct electrical stimulation of human sensorimotor cortex, working with patients that were implanted with electrodes in their brains for clinical care of epilepsy and movement disorders such as Parkinson’s and Essential Tremor. He is broadly interested in neural engineering and intracranial electrophysiology.

Monica Chao

Monica is a Neurologist and an Epilepsy Clinical Fellow in the Department of Neurology at UCSF. She trained at Harvard University, University of Cambridge, and Harvard Medical School before coming to UCSF for Neurology Residency training, and following fellowship she is joining the UCSF Epilepsy faculty. She is interested in epilepsy surgery, neuromodulation devices and computational neuroscience research. 

Akshat Kalra

Akshat is a Staff Research Associate who recently completed his Master’s in Computer Science and Engineering from Santa Clara University. He is interested in neuromodulation and his graduate research was based on a closed loop system between photobiomodulation and EEG, and in designing low intensity focused ultrasound devices. Apart from writing software pipelines for enabling intracranial neurophysiological research in the Kleen Lab, he works on mapping the semantic memory circuitry of the human brain. When not in the lab, you can find him exploring the various ice cream shops and bakeries that SF has to offer.

Devon Krish

Devon is a current undergraduate studying bioengineering, electrical, and computer engineering (EECS) at UC Berkeley. He is widely interested in using machine learning and signal processing algorithms to decode abnormal bursts of neural activity. On previous projects, he’s worked to understand the link between interictal spikes and memory/language impairments, and he is currently focused on optimizing intracranial biomarker detection for neuromodulation and other cutting-edge technologies. In his free time, he enjoys writing music for film.

Grant Park

Grant is a Clinical Research Coordinator in the Laboratory of Edward Chang and he is co-mentored in the Kleen Lab by Dr. Kleen. He completed his Bachelor's Degree in B.S. in Computer Science (Computational Biology Track) at Stanford University. He works on software development for user interfaces used by researchers and physicians to annotate epilepsy-related brain wave phenomena (interictal spikes) in intracranial recordings.

Natalia Sucher Munizaga

Natalia grew up in New York City, earned her BA in Ancient Greek and Latin at Swarthmore College, and now is back in school for her post-baccalaureate at UC Berkeley and City College of San Francisco studying computational neuroscience. Her focus is conducting epilepsy research, specifically writing algorithms in MATLAB and Python to integrate semiology and electrophysiology in order to localize and track the propagation of seizure activity in the brain.