Assistant Professor

Amelia is a native of Australia (yes, we have Kangaroos). She obtained her Bachelor of Biomedical Science with Honours from the University of Queensland, Australia before moving to Munich, Germany to complete her PhD with Ruediger Klein at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology. She then moved to Boston, USA for her postdoc where she worked with Brad Lowell at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. Here, she discovered how the brain’s stress axis becomes activated during starvation and pioneered methods to perform continuous recordings of neural activity to understand the circadian control of feeding.

Outside of the lab she loves to bake with weird and wonderful flavors, tries to hike as many mountains as possible and, is raising a tiny human.

Technician/Lab manager

Guru Prasad is originally from India, where he completed his undergraduate studies in Biomedical Engineering. He went on to earn a Master’s degree in Biomedical Imaging from the University of Turku, Finland. He then moved to Switzerland to pursue his doctoral studies at the University of Geneva in the lab of Prof. Christoph Michel, where he worked with the kainate mouse model of epilepsy and discovered the importance of remote regions in large-scale epileptic networks.For his postdoctoral research at University College London (UCL) in the lab of Prof. Dimitri Kullmann, Guru investigated focal cortical dysplasia using mouse models and neuropixels recordings. He joined the Douglass lab in August 2025.

Outside the lab, Guru enjoys hiking, practicing yoga, and writing poetry.

PhD Student

Dow attended the Humboldt University in Berlin for his Bachelor's in Biology and completed a masters in Neuroscience at the University of Vienna. His work guided him from Home-Cage monitoring at the Winter Lab over affective Neuroscience at the Haubensack Lab to finally conducting a characterization of the developing cortex at the Hippenmeyer group. As a PhD student In the Douglass lab, Dow is studying how chronic stress affects autonomic physiology.

Outside the lab Dow enjoys cooking and sharing food, getting lost in a book and exploring a new creative outlet. 

PhD Student

Alex received his Bachelor's in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh, followed by work as a technician in the labs of both Kate Hong at Carnegie Mellon University studying systems neuroscience in barrel cortex, and Vibhu Sahni in New York studying the development of corticospinal circuits. He came to ISTA in 2025 and joined the Douglass group to pursue his PhD, with a particular interest in how simultaneous stressors compete and are prioritized by the brain.

In his free time Alex enjoys rock climbing either at the gym or outdoors, and trying to get people to play one of his rapidly growing collection of boardgames.

PhD Student

Juan Pablo is originally from Mexico, where he trained as a medical doctor at UNAM before completing a Master’s degree in Neurobiology at the Institute of Neurobiology, UNAM. His work there focused on motivational alterations associated with substance use disorders, using MRI and quantitative microscopy. This interest took him to the University of Eastern Finland, where he studied structural organization across spatial scales through quantitative image analysis. He later returned to the Institute of Neurobiology as a research collaborator, developing computational methods to characterize glial morphology and spatial organization. This work eventually brought him to ISTA, where he extended his research into dynamics and collective cell behavior using iPS cell-derived systems and organoids.

He joined the Douglass lab as a PhD student to ask how the brain coordinates physiology and behavior under stress, and which aspects of this organization remain invariant across different stress modalities.

Outside the lab, Juan Pablo enjoys slow mornings, drawing, and getting pleasantly lost somewhere between an idea and a blank page.

Rotation student

Eunice Barbosa joined the lab in August 2025 as a Scientific Intern. She grew up in Mexico and received her bachelor’s in Biosciences from Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico) in June 2025. Eunice previous worked in Brad Lowell’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where she investigated neural circuits that control feeding. As an intern in the Douglass lab, she is currently characterizing the acute stress response by tracking behavior, physiology, and neural activity in the hypothalamus. 

In her free time, she likes to cook, mostly so she doesn't starve.

Rotation Student

Marina was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where she studied Psychology before moving to Vienna to complete a Master’s degree in Neurobiology. She gained experience in systems neuroscience and neuroanatomy while working in the laboratory of Thomas Klausberger at the Medical University of Vienna, focusing on cognitive flexibility. Since August 2025, Marina has worked in the Douglass lab, where she is now investigating hypothalamic circuits.

She became a passionate snowboarder before she was even old enough to remember it, and she has a lasting love for mandarins, tea, and black pepper.