Lab Members
Diego Mendoza-Halliday, PhD
Principal Investigator
Email: diegomendoza {at} pitt.edu
Diego Mendoza-Halliday is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also Training Faculty in the Neuroscience Institute Graduate Programs at Carnegie Mellon University, a Faculty member at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and a Research Affiliate in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Previously, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scientist in the lab of Dr. Robert Desimone at MIT, where he applied multi-electrode laminar recordings and developed optogenetic tools to investigate the neuronal mechanisms of visual feature attention, working memory, and their interaction. Dr. Mendoza-Halliday completed his PhD in Cognitive Neurophysiology at McGill University under the research mentorship of Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo.
Vishnu Soni
PhD Student (CNUP Program)
vys14 {at} pitt.edu
Education
B.S. - Neuropsychology
University of New Hampshire, Manchester, NH
Adam Persello
Research Tech
Email: ajp150 {at} pitt.edu
Education
B.S. - Neuroscience / B.A. - Music
M.S. Candidate - Bioengineering
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Cameron Blakeley
Research Tech
Email: cab655 {at} pitt.edu
Education
B.S. - Biological Sciences
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Previous Lab Members
Ahmed Abdaltawab (2024-2026)
Postdoc
Education
M.D.
Cairo University Medical School, Cairo, Egypt
Noah Lasky-Nielson (2025)
Ph.D. rotation Student - CNUP Program
Education
B.S. - Neuroscience / Biology
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Avyukth Nilajagi (2025-2026)
Undergraduate Student
Education
B.S. (current) - Computer Science / Applied Mathematics
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
Zitong (Tony) Gao (2025)
Undergraduate Student - CNUP Summer Research Program
Education
B.S. (current) - Neuroscience / Medicine, Health, and Society
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Current/Recent Collaborators
Andre Bastos
Vanderbilt
Charles Greenspon
University of Chicago
Robert Gaunt
University of Pittsburgh
James Herman
University of Pittsburgh
Neeraj Gandhi
University of Pittsburgh
Kari Hoffman
Vanderbilt
Christopher Cueva / Andrii Zahorodnii
MIT
Julio Martinez-Trujillo
Professor, Western University
Spectrolaminar cross-species consortium:
Istvan Ulbert and Richárd Fiáth (HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungary), Dajun Xing (Beijing Normal University, China), Srivatsun Sadagopan (University of Pittsburgh), Stefan Everling (Western University, Canada), Andre Bastos (Venderbilt University), Julio Hechavarria (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany), Michael Ibbotson (University of Melbourne), Jianhua Cang (University of Virginia), John Wolf (University of Pennsylvania), Marco de Curtis (Istituto Nazionale Neurologico, Italy), Mark Shein-Idelson (Tel-Aviv University, Israel).
