About Us
Erin Kinnally, Ph.D. (UC Davis 2007)
Erin Kinnally is a biological psychologist with expertise in the fields of primate behavior, neuroscience and epigenomics. Dr. Kinnally obtained her PhD at the University of California, Davis and was a Paul Janssen Postdoctoral Fellow in Translational Neuroscience at Columbia University. She is now an Associate Professional Researcher in the department of Psychology at UC Davis and a core scientist at the California National Primate Research Center. She is also the director of the Biobehavioral Assessment program at the CNPRC. Recent funding sources include NICHD, NIAID, NIMH, NIH Office of the Director, the Harry Frank Guggenheim foundation and Escher Foundation for Autism. She is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Primatology and Environmental Epigenetics.
Lesly Ceniceros, B.S. (UC Davis 2017)
Lesly Ceniceros graduated from UC Davis with a B.S in Human Development and has been largely interested on the impacts of early life stress. Her work has examined the effects of prenatal relocation stress across various metrics of postnatal resilience during BBA (bio behavioral assessment). Recent awards include Division 6: Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology Pipeline Scholar.
Alexandra Dwulit, MSc, Environmental Biology, Cognitive Neurobiology (Utrecht University; Utrecht, Netherlands)
Alexandra Dwulit is a PhD student in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group, interested in comparative behavior and pain, translational neurobehavioral research, spontaneous disease models, and applied ethology. She completed her master’s in the Netherlands, with her main project focusing on effects of sleep deprivation of zebra finches on behavior, cognition and neurogenesis. She is currently working with rhesus macaque models to examine the gut-brain axis interactions in age-related neurodegeneration, as well as looking at biomarkers of depression, including cognitive, affective, microbiome, and potentially neural. When she is not reading about animal neuro and cognition, she loves hiking, dog walking and traveling whenever possible.
Sophia Lunardi, B.S. candidate Quantitative Psychology (UC Davis, 2024)
Sophia Lunardi is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of California, Davis. She is working towards a B.S. in Quantitative Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience. In the future, she would like to attend graduate school and continue to work in psychology research.
Ansh Jain, B.S. candidate Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior (UC Davis, 2025)
Ansh Jain is a first-year Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior undergraduate at UC Davis. He is interested in learning about the interactions between genetics (especially epigenetics) and real-world behavior. He is also intrigued with the manifestations of autism-like characteristics in primates. He plans to attend medical school in the future.