Meet the team
Zane directs the ICON lab at the University of Maryland, following a postdoctoral fellowship at NIH/NINDS. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from University of California, Riverside. Prior to graduate school, he completed undergraduate education at Renmin University of China and received research training on Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology at University of California, Davis and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The "Xie" family name means "Thanks" in Chinese (with a similar pronunciation). He feels extremely grateful to be able to work with and learn from so many fantastic students and scholars over the years (see below).
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Principal Investigator
zanexie@umd.edu
Research Staff
Jenna Longbein, Research coordinator, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Jenna is originally from Brookeville, MD and graduated from Wake Forest University in 2019 with a degree in biology. She started medical school at Virginia Commonwealth University, after spending her gap year working as a medical scribe at an ENT office and doing research on patients with brain tumors. In medical school, she started doing research with a clinical neuropsychology lab, which aims to advance neuro-oncology wellness. She has also resided as president of an organization called The Simple Sunflower, which serves to repurpose flowers from local weddings to distribute to patients receiving care at VCU Medical Center. In her free time, you can catch her at the local farmers market, staying active with a hike or going skiing, or jetting off to somewhere she hasn't been before.
Sanikaa Thakurdesai (she/her), Lab manager
Sanikaa recently graduated from the University South Florida with a Major in Psychology and minor in Public Health. After coming to USF as an international student from India, she worked as a research assistant in various labs including Dr. Clayson’s Psychophysiology and neuroscience lab. She will now serve as a Lab Manager for the ICON lab at UMD and is excited for this opportunity to learn more about neuroscience. In the future, she hopes to study clinical/cognitive neuropsychology in graduate school. She is interested in learning more about how brain disorders affect cognition like memory and emotional processes. Outside of school, she enjoys reading, catching up with TV shows, photography, and talking to friends and family back home!
Graduate students collaborators
Xinchi Yu (NACS; Department of Lingusitic)
Xinchi is a 4th year PhD student in the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at University of Maryland. He received undergraduate education at Peking University, majoring in Psychology and Computational Linguistics. He also spent some time as a visiting student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. With training in both language science and vision science, he is broadly interested in topics that cut across the two fields, with the hope of bringing the insights across the two fields together. He is interested in using both behavioral and neural research methods. Currently, his research focuses on two topics: (1) the working memory representations for visual and semantic-conceptual content, and (2) visual and linguistic representations during reading. In his leisure time, he loves metal music but prefers listening to it on his own rather than going to live performances. Personal site.
Undergraduate RAs
Shlok Desai
Shlok studies Computer Science at UMD. His coding journey began in an after-school club in middle school, leading to a deep-seated interest in computer science and its cross-disciplinary applications. Previously, Shlok engaged in computational neuroscience research alongside a PhD candidate from UC San Diego, which led to a publication in the Journal of Student Research. He also conducted bio-robotics research under Professor Reikensmeyer at UC Irvine as a UC research fellow, and published a paper on machine learning approaches to predicting the concentration of Particulate Matter. in his free time, Shlok enjoys staying active through working out and basketball, unwinding with movies, participating in clubs (such as Terp Rockets, Boxing, and BitCamp), hiking, and cherishing time with friends and family.
Joshua Macmillan
Josh is a Neurobiology and Physiology student at UMD, interested in neuroscience and cognitive research. Josh looks forward to the collected data that will give him some insight into the research. Originally a bioengineering student, he pivoted to the biology department to learn more about the brain and human physiology as it has been his biggest passion. In addition to his major, he is working towards a minor in Global Poverty. Outside of the classroom he works as a group leader in the Maryland Mentor Corps, helping underprivileged students in Prince George’s County learn to read and write. His hobbies include spending time with friends and family, listening to music, and hydroponic gardening.
Asbah Qadri
Asbah is pursuing a Neuroscience and Public Health double degree at UMD. She has previous experience at the Naval Medical Research Center's Neurotrauma lab, where she developed a keen interest in neuroscience-related research as she studied the effects of blast induced traumatic injury on the blood-brain barrier. She hopes to learn more about the impacts of age and various brain disorders on memory and learning, as well as its applications in translational medicine. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, playing tennis, and watching soccer with her friends!
Daniel Teshome
Daniel studies Neuroscience at UMD. His interest in neuroscience began in high school, in a psychology class, from learning about infamous experiments such as the Milgram and Stanford experiments to case studies about injuries to different parts of the brain. In the future, he is interested in pursuing further study into the pathologies of brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s. Aside from academics, Daniel enjoys improvising on the saxophone, streaming shows online, spending time with friends, and playing intramural soccer.
Srihitha Akula
Srihitha studies Physiology and Neurobiology with a minor in Humanities, Health, and Medicine at UMD. She has had previous research experience working in the Material Measurement Laboratory at NIST, researching Nanofibrillated Cellulose, and conducting her own independent research on Brain-to-Brain Transmission and its Impact on the Medical Field. She is excited to serve as a Research Assistant in our lab, to learn more about the vast field of neuroscience! In the future, Srihitha hopes to pursue medicine, to become a Physician specializing in Internal Medicine. Outside of school, she enjoys participating in Indian Classical dance and music, reading, and traveling with her family!
Collaborators
Weiwei Zhang, Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside
Kareem Zaghloul, Senior Investigator, NIH/NINDS
Chris Baker, Senior Investigator, NIH/NIMH
Alexander Ksendzovsky, Assistant Professor in Neurosurgery, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Nils Fang Yang, Research Fellow, NIH/NINDS
Wilma Bainbridge, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago
Chaoxiong Ye, Associate Professor, Tampere University, Finland
In memoriam
Robert Rosenthal, University Professor, University of California, Riverside