About the Hosts of TWiN
Vincent Racaniello, Ph.D.
Vincent is a Professor of Microbiology at Columbia University Medical Center. He has been studying viruses for over 30 years, starting in 1975, when he entered the Ph.D. program in Biomedical Sciences at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine of the City University of New York with a focus on influenza viruses …
Read Vincent’s full bio here.
@profvrr on X and Instagram
Jason Shepherd, Ph.D.
Jason Shepherd is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and holds the Jon M. Huntsman Presidential Chair at the University of Utah. He obtained his BSc (Hons) at the University of Otago, his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award in Neuroscience, the International Society for Neurochemistry Young Investigator Award, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award, the Research to Prevent Blindness Stein Innovation Award, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award, and is a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow. Born in South Africa and raised in New Zealand, Dr. Shepherd enjoys the outdoors and Utah’s natural beauty.
Vivianne Morrison, Ph.D.
Dr. Vivianne Morrison received her PhD in neuroscience in 2019 from Georgetown University where under the guidance of Dr. Jeff K. Huang and with independent funding from the NSF, she studied oligodendrocyte development. She began her postdoctoral work at Vanderbilt University in 2020 with Dr. Bruce Carter, exploring the role of microglial phagocytosis in neurogensis; an F32-funded project that she continued to persue at Tulane University while also contributing to the research of Dr. Gregory Bix, and later, Dr. Maria Galazo in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Dr. Morrison is now a research scientist in the labortory of Dr. Kevin Zwezdaryk, where she manages an NIH funded project aimed at exploring viral etiologies of Alzheimer’s Disease in collaboration with Dr. Elizabel Enger-Chiurazzi.
Tim Cheung, Ph.D.
Tim is a research scientist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, in the lab of Dr. Un Kang. Tim was born and raised in Hong Kong. He obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he studied the role of the nucleus accumbens and the hippocampus in allowing an animal to bridge the gap between an action and its subsequent delayed reward. He obtained his PhD from the University of Nottingham, UK, where he examined the role of dopamine and serotonin in time perception. During his postdoctoral fellowship at Arizona State University, Tim examined the neural mechanism of cocaine seeking behaviour, particularly the role of the D3 dopamine receptor. At NYU, Tim is studying how dopamine-dependent learning contributes to both 1) motor impairment in Parkinson’s disease, and to 2) the important and surprisingly long-lasting therapeutic effect of dopamine-replacement therapy.