Postdoc Advisory Panel
The Postdoctoral Advisory Panel is a group of postdocs who represents over 250 postdocs at Brown University. They volunteer to meet periodically with the Division of BioMed's Associate Dean for Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and Postdoctoral Program & Data Manager, and the Graduate School's Assistant Dean of Recruiting and Professional Development with a goal to enhance the postdoctoral experience at Brown.
As a valued member of the Brown University community, your opinion matters. Feel free to contact any member of the Postdoc Advisory Panel with any concerns or ideas. If your department is not represented below, contact our office at t OGPS@brown.edu to volunteer. All meeting minutes are listed below.
Advisory Panel Meetings:
Postdoc Advisory Panel Meetings are scheduled three times per year in the fall, spring, and summer.
Upcoming meeting:
Date:October 23, 2013
Time: 1:00 - 2:00 PM
Location: 47 George Street, Horace Mann building, conference room 103
Current Postdoc Advisory Panel Members
Read below bios to learn more about the current members of your Postdoctoral Advisory Panel.
Michael Antosh (Institute for Brain & Neural Systems)
Dr. Antosh
is a Rhode Island native. He received a B.S. in Physics from the University of New Hampshire. In 2012 he received a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown, working on gene expression responses to stress in fruit flies (D. melanogaster). He stayed at Brown to continue working under Leon Cooper, Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems, with a project related to biological responses to radiation.
Suzanne Pilaar Birch (Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World)
Dr Birch is a postdoctoral fellow in archaeology for the academic year 2013-2014. She received her MPhil (2009) in Archaeological Science and her PhD (2012) in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. Prior to moving to the UK, she completed a BSc in Evolutionary Anthropology and in Paleoecology at Rutgers University in her home state of New Jersey. Her research focuses on understanding human adaptation to environmental changes in prehistory, particularly the transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural lifestyles after the end of the last ice age. She recently edited the volume "Integrating Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Analyses", a special issue of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.
Stafano Bloch (Urban Studies, Cogut Center)
Stefano Bloch holds a BA in literature from UC Santa Cruz, an MA in urban planning from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Minnesota where he was a Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. His dissertation, The Changing Face of Wall Space, is an ethnographic study on the mural and graffiti communities in Los Angeles. He has most recently published his work in the Radical History Review and City. He teaches Crime and the City (fall) and Do-It-Yourself Urbanism (spring) in the Urban Studies Program at Brown. He, his three children and partner Maria live in, and are homesick for, Los Angeles.
Havovi Chichger (Medicine)
Dr. Chichger is originally from England where she received her B.Sc in Biochemistry from Kings College London in 2001. She spent 2 years researching cancer cell signaling at Edinburgh University before beginning her graduate studies in Physiology at University College London. In 2011, upon completion of her Ph.D. based on renal glucose handling in metabolic disease, she moved to Brown University to join the laboratory of Dr. Harrington, within the Vascular Research Laboratory. Her postdoctoral research focuses on the molecular mechanisms responsible for the disruption of the endothelial barrier in settings of acute lung injury.
Christopher Ciarleglio (Neuroscience) Chris Ciarleglio
Dr. Ciarleglio
is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Neuroscience. Originally from central Connecticut, he obtained his undergraduate degree in biology and ancient history from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania before moving to Nashville, Tennessee where he received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Vanderbilt University in 2009. There, he studied the neural circuitry of circadian rhythms in the laboratory of Dr. Doug McMahon. After serving a brief stint as Assistant Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute under Mark Wallace, Ph.D., he moved to Brown University in 2011 and is currently in the lab of Dr. Carlos Aizenman, with whom he studies visual neural circuitry development in the frog tadpole brain. Ultimately, Dr. Ciarleglio's research interests lie in how environmental factors like light interact with the genome to imprint behavioral and molecular traits.
Iuliana Ene (MMI)
Sebastjan Glinsek (Engineering)
Amy Holmes (Watson Institute)
Amy Austin Holmes is a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo. She holds a PhD in sociology from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include social movements, revolutions, critical security studies, and US foreign policy in Europe and the Middle East. Recently she has held fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Toulouse, and at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena.
Elayne Oliphant (Religious Studies, Cogut Center)
Holly Richendrfer (MCB, Developmental & Neuro Biology)
Dr. Richendrfer is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of BioMed - MCB. She was born and grew up in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania and resided in PA until her move to Rhode Island. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Messiah College in Grantham, PA in biology pre-med. She then went on to obtain a master's degree from Bloomsburg University (PA) in the area of biology where she studied the effects of spine removal on health and activity rates in green sea urchins. In August of 2010 she went on to complete her PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA). There she studied the development of neuronal and neurotransmitter sex differences in the brain of the Syrian hamster and how those differences related to sex differences in behavior. She is currently working in the Creton lab on the effects of calcium modulatory drugs on early brain and heart development and its relation to anxiety behavior in zebra fish larvae.
Jill Yersak (Neuroscience)
Dr. Yersak is a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Neuroscience. She is originally from Shamong, NJ. She attended Ursinus College in Collegeville, PA where she received her BS in Biology with a minor in Psychology. From there she worked as a research technician in the Human Genetics Department at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia where she studied 22q11 Deletion Syndrome. She stayed in Philadelphia to attend graduate school at Thomas Jefferson University where she studied the pathogenesis of a neurodegenerative disease, Spinal Bulbar Muscular Atrophy. From there she moved north to Providence to join Dr. Anne Hart's lab for her post-doctoral fellowship. Here she utilizes a worm model, C. elegans, to explore how conserved genes cause dysfunction in Lou Gehrig's Disease.