Faculty Member
Assistant Professor
Department of Physiology
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Physiology
Center for Health Sciences, 53-320
630 Charles E Young Dr S,
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Biography
Chuchu Zhang, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She then received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, where she worked with Dr. David Julius studying pain-producing toxins from venomous animals. Her work utilized these natural toxins to identify and manipulate pain-related signal transduction machineries in sensory neurons. Afterwards, she carried out her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Stephen Liberles at Harvard Medical School, where she started her independent trajectory to study nausea. She focused on a brain structure, the area postrema, which mediates nausea responses to several visceral threats. Her work has uncovered fundamental aspects of the area postrema, including cell types, receptors, and nausea-related neural circuits. The Zhang Lab opens in September 2023 at UCLA.
Faculty Member
Associate Professor
Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
UCLA Semel Institute
760 Westwood Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Biography
Dr. April Thames is Director of the Social Neuroscience and Health Psychology Laboratory, Professor of Psychiatry and Chief Psychologist of the Adult Psychology Division within the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. For the past 20 years, her research program has been devoted to understanding cultural and social influences on health and behavior. She was the first to demonstrate the effects of how societal stereotypes and discrimination influence performance on neuropsychological testing. More recently, her workin the impact of how racial discrimination relates to black-white differences in gene expression has garnered attention across several media outlets including NBC California Live, NPR news, and the Nation’s Health. She is the first to propose and illustrate the “dissociative interference” hypothesis of trauma as it relates to memory complaints among clinic patients who demonstrate normal performance on neuropsychological testing. Dr. Thames is passionate about promoting equitable healthcare and health care practices in partnership with community stakeholders.
