Interested in joining our team?
Are you a high school student looking for research experience?
We understand that high schoolers motivated to pursue STEM careers want to participate in laboratory research. Our group hosts high schoolers only in the summer and through CUNY’s CollegeNow program. This opportunity is prioritized for students within the NYC public school system who lack rigorous science programs. It provides a summer stipend that allows you to be 100% focused on research for two months! If you’d like to find out if you’re eligible, please get in touch with their coordinators!
Are you an undergraduate at Queens College?
If you have never worked in a lab, that’s okay! However, consider that it is at least a 10+ hour commitment per week, and we expect you to be accountable for this time. We encourage all our students enrolled in an HMNS, psychology, and biology major to consider the research credit you can sign up for to carry out in our lab. For the summer, you are also welcome to participate in our behavioral ecology field course (BIOL380/680) or secure funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research. Similarly, as an undergraduate, you may also be eligible for Queens College’s accelerated track, which provides graduate training and research during your undergraduate training. If any of this sounds like something that would interest you, please reach out through our contact page form. Lastly, we also host an NIH URISE training grant to support student success in STEM. If you see yourself as eligible for this funding, please reach out using the contact form!
Are you interested in graduate studies as an M.Sc. or Ph.D. student?
Our lab covers multiple research areas offered through Biology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. This includes an affiliation with CUNY’s Cognitive Neuroscience Master’s program and CUNY’s Doctoral Programs. We have projects that fall into the arms of Molecular Cellular Development (MCD), Evolution Ecology Behavior (EEB), and the CUNY Neuroscience Collaborative (CNC). We are a diverse and inclusive group of people! If you are interested in our research, please identify a specific research stream (MCD/EEB/CNC) that interests you and reach out through our contact form with any relevant experience you may already have. We also encourage you to explore the training experience provided through CUNY and its Graduate Center to see how your training unfolds in our program.
Principal Investigator
Sebastian Alvarado, Ph.D.
Sebastian completed his Ph.D. at McGill University and was an A.P. Giannini Fellow at Stanford University. He is interested in how plastic molecular substrates can shape a genome to dynamic changes in the environment. Outside of his research program, Sebastian consults for the entertainment sector with Thwacke and writes books about science fiction. You can follow him on Twitter @Sebcredible
Graduate Students
Annaliese Chang
Annaliese is a EEB doctoral candidate and resident bioinformatician. She is interested in the patterns of DNA methylation and transcription that accompany a color change and their ties to neuroendocrine signals
Matthew Hackett
Matt is an incoming CNC doctoral candidate studying coloration and its effect on neural substrates in the A. burtoni and in bluegill sunfish. You can find him talking about nerdy stuff on Twitter @Nom_the_Wise
Anastasia MartaShVILI
Anastasia is a Graduate Center Cognitive Neuroscience Masters Student. She is currently investigating how visual ecology can shape female mate preference and reproductive biology.
Postbaccalaureates
Chelsea O’Neill
Chelsea is a Postbaccalaureate and QC alumnus that is setting up laboratory protocols around the primary culture of chromatophores from our model system as well as the transgenic labeling of epigenetic modulators in our model system
Fatima Haruna IYA
Fatima is an undergraduate in QC’s neuroscience program and she is currently investigating the effects of ambient light on the dorso-ventral countercurrent shading that changes within our model cichlid system.
Undergraduates
Da Eun Kim
Da Eun is an LSAMP/URISE Scholar hosted by our lab who initially arrived as a CUNY Career Launch Intern. After doing a great deal of image analysis for our Cephalod pigmentation projects, he is now attempting to label the peripheral nervous system of cichlids in their skin.
Renisha Sharma
Renisha is a LSAMP undergraduate researcher who is currently investigating how patterns in our cichlid system change with social rank within their scales and chromatophores.
Kristen Sosa
Kristen is a Neuroscience Major in the Alvarado Lab playing a role in supporting animal husbandry and behavioral scoring efforts in the lab.
Angelica Onofre Alvarez
Angelica joined our lab after being indoctrinated into our research program via BIOL200 and BIOL381! She is currently doing pigmentation studies on the scales of our cichlid and bluegill systems!
Collaborators
Maral Tajerian,Ph.D.
Dr. Tajerian is a preclinical pain researcher that has been a longtime collaborator interested in the limits of brain plasticity.
Wei Fang, Ph.D.
Dr. Fang is a forest ecologist and faculty at Pace University and she helps us environmental phenotypes from space!
Yefim RAdomyselskiy
Yefim is a Physics Chief Lab Technician and go to engineer behind all of our tools, lighting, dosing, camera rigs, and the Tanganyikan sunsets that our fish our thankful for every day!