Chennan was born and raised in southwestern China in the city of Kunming. He received his B.S. in Bioinformatics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. After graduation, he studied principles of neural computations in the fruit fly’s navigation system in Dr. Rachel Wilson’s lab at Harvard. At UCSF, he recently joined Dr. Vijay Namboodiri’s lab, studying the brain mechanisms that support reward learning. Outside of lab, he is into rock climbing, tennis, and camping.

Phoebe is a PhD student in Dr. Zachary Knight’s lab. She is studying neural representations of pre-gastric cues. In the bigger picture, Phoebe is interested in how internal states are represented in the brain and how these states drive animals to interact with the environment. Before UCSF, Phoebe worked on hippocampal place cell encoding in Dr. Mark Sheffield’s lab at UChicago and endocannabinoid modulation of defensive responses in Dr. Sachin Patel’s lab at Northwestern. Outside of work, she can be found lifting weights, enjoying Golden Gate Park, or finding new cafes.