The bendesky lab

© drawings of Betta sp. by Jordan Ahava

Andrés Bendesky

Principal Investigator

Andrés got his MD from UNAM, Mexico, his PhD from Rockefeller University, and was a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow at Harvard. He is interested in how complex behaviors are generated by the brain and how they evolve.

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Kerel Francis

Lab Manager and Research Assistant

Kerel received his MSc in Neuroscience from the University of Bremen. Currently he is working in collaboration with the Kӧnig lab at the University of Zurich whose aim is to understand the evolution of social behavior in mice.

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Madison Lichak

Research Assistant

Madison received her BA from Barnard College and completed her senior thesis in the Bendesky lab. She now coordinates the Betta facility and is working to develop genetically modified Betta fish.

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Young Mi Kwon

Research Assistant

Young Mi got her BS from Harvard and her masters from the University of Cambridge, UK. She is studying genetics in Betta fish.

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Amy Norovich

Postdoc

Amy received her PhD from Columbia University and her BSc from MIT. She is studying the neural basis of sexually dimorphic behaviors in Betta splendens.

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Christoph Gebhardt

Postdoc

Chris received his PhD from KIT and was a postdoc in the lab of Filippo Del Bene. He aims to understand the neural basis of differences in parental care behavior in Peromyscus.

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Pei-Yin Shih

Postdoc

Pei received her PhD from Caltech working in the lab of Paul Sternberg. She is studying the genetic basis of aggression in Betta splendens.

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Jan-Niklas Runge

Postdoc

Jan received his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his BSc and MSc from the University of Göttingen, Germany. He is studying the genomics of inbreeding and its consequences in a long-term field study of free-living wild house mice using novel whole-genome imputation approaches.

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Jennifer Merritt

Postdoc

Jenny received her PhD from Emory University. She is studying the neural and genetic mechanisms of alternative life histories in closely related species of Peromyscus.

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Natalie Niepoth

PhD Student (E3B program)

Natalie got her BSc from Rice University and a masters in evolutionary biology from the University of Amsterdam. She is studying the genetic basis of anxiety and exploration in Peromyscus mice.

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Claire Everett

PhD Student (NBB program)

Claire received her BA from Barnard College. She is studying the visual cues critical for evoking aggression in Betta splendens. She is also interested in the neural circuits underlying Betta visual processing of aggression-inducing stimuli.

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Kimberly Hernandez

PhD Student (NBB program)

Kim is a PhD student in the lab jointly supervised by Andrés and Steven Siegelbaum.

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Hiroki Tomida

Master student (E3B program)

Hiroki got his BA from ICU. He is studying the genetic basis of aggressive behavior in Betta fish. He is interested in the genetic basis and evolution of complex traits.

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Yuyang Zhu

Master student

Yuyang is a Statistics student at GSAS. He is extracting behavioral features and validating models on in Betta fish behavioral patterns.

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Yuqi Miao

Master student

Yuqi is a student at Columbia Mailman Public Health school. She is interested in developing and validating statistical methods for modelling and analyzing Betta splendens aggressive behavior.

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Wenxuan Dan

Master student

Wenxuan is a Statistics Student at GSAS. He is interested in how statistical models can extract patterns of animal behaviors. He is working on Peromyscus tracking data and modeling of parental care behavior.

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Peter Lichtenthal

Undergrad

Peter is a post-bac in Columbia's E3B program. Peter works in breeding wild caught Betta fish, and assists Claire and Madison in their behavioral and genetic work.

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Elaine Lee

Undergrad

Elaine is a student at Columbia College. She is interested in how aggression in Betta splendens manifests on the circuitry level and how aggression circuits differ between males and females.

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Joseph Brew

Undergrad

Joseph is a student at Columbia College in the E3B program. He is interested in the behavioural and evolutionary impacts of climate change as well as understanding complex behavioural processes through the study of genetics.

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Julio Bendesky

Lab Mascot

Julio is a dachshund and really good at detecting and retrieving food (that belongs to others).

Madison Lichak

Undergrad

Madison received her BA from Barnard College and completed her senior thesis in the Bendesky lab.

Magdalen Kwarteng

Undergrad

Magdalen was a student at Barnard College and studied visually evoked aggression in Betta fish in the Bendesky Lab.

Emily Lei

Undergrad

Emily was a student at Barnard College and studied in the Bendesky lab how the brain and periphery interact to shape exploratory behavior.