People

CATHERINE JENSEN PEñA, PhD

Assistant Professor, Princeton Neuroscience Institute

Affiliate faculty, Graduate Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Comparative Genomics, Princeton

Affiliate faculty, Center for Health and Wellbeing

B.A.  University of Pennsylvania

Ph.D.  Columbia University

Robin Chemers Neustein Postdoctoral Fellow, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Mom to two great kiddos

cpena@princeton.edu  |  CV (2022) |  Google Scholar

Postdoctoral Fellows

Forrest Dylan Rogers, PhD | CV (2024)

Co-advised by Dr. Ricardo Mallarino in the Department of Molecular Biology

2023 Postdoctoral F32 Award from NICHD
2023 New Investigator Award, Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology
2022 Cold Spring Harbor High Throughput Neuroanatomy course scholarship
2022 Society for Neuroscience Trainee Professional Development Award

Forrest is principally interested in elucidating the neurobiological causes and biobehavioral consequences of parental care. He is leading a series of projects to understand how functional brain connectivity and gene expression patterns contribute to natural variation in paternal care using biparental African striped mice.

Forrest received his PhD in 2020 from the University of California, Davis. His doctoral work, completed under the advisement of Dr. Karen Bales, investigated how compositional variation in early life parenting structures alters biobehavioral development in socially monogamous and biparental prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster). As a trainee in the NIMH-sponsored (T32) Bay Area Affective Science Training Program, he completed additional training in human psychophysiology under the advisement of Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes at the University of California, San Francisco. Forrest completed his B.S. in Biological Science (College & Departmental Honors) and his B.A. in French from Oklahoma State University.

Rixing Lin, PhD:

2023-2026 C.V. Starr Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton

Rixing received his undergraduate degree (B.A.) in cell biology and neuroscience from Rutgers University-New Brunswick (NJ, USA). He received his doctoral degree (Ph.D.) in neuroscience from McGill University (Montréal, Canada), under the supervision of Dr. Gustavo Turecki, where he studied the role of non-coding RNA in major depressive disorder and antidepressant treatment response. As a McGill University and Mitacs Globalink sponsored trainee, Rixing received additional training on single-nuclei approaches to assess genomic architecture at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (NY, USA) under the advisement of Dr. Schahram Akbarian.  

Jay Kim, PhD:

2024 Society for Neuroscience Trainee Professional Development Award
2024-2025 UCHV Future Values Fellow

Jay completed her BSc Hons degree in physiology and pharmacology, MSc degree in pharmacology, and PhD in pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada). Her doctoral thesis with Dr. Robert Laprairie focused on the pharmacodynamic interactions between cannabinoids and other neuropsychoactive drugs. At the University of Saskatchewan, Jay was also a graduate teaching fellow and a sessional lecturer for the professional pharmacy program. In the Peña Lab, Jay is developing a novel CRISPR-based epigenome editing tool for application in cells and mice.

Rebekah Rashford, PhD

2020 National Science Foundation GRFP Honorable Mention
2022 NIMH NRSA F31

Rebekah is leading research to understand how early life stress alters chromatin architecture in a subset of stress-responsive neurons, and reversing such changes to promote resilience using custom CRISPR-based epigenome editing tools in vitro and in vivo.

Rebekah was a Meyerhoff Scholar and Biological Sciences major at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Previously, Rebekah researched ribosomal protein binding during ribosomal RNA maturation. She defended her dissertation in the Peña Lab in June, 2024.

Data scientists & Computational Biologists

Nibal Arzouni, PhD

Research Software Engineer

Nibal is interested in computational neuroscience at the molecular, genetics, and imaging levels. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California (USC) where he was a member of the imaging genetics group at the Lab of Neuroimaging (LONI). His doctoral research work was focused on dementia especially Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using multi-modal data. He studied differentially expressed genes for late onset AD, ethno-racial disparities in AD, and environmental pollution and its effects on human health and brain. He also holds degrees in electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, and computer science from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and USC. His computational interests lie in using engineering/computer science machine learning and signal processing techniques for neuroscience research. He is a joint member with Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

Mike DeBerardine, PhD

Research Software Engineer

Mike is a Research Software Engineer shared between the Krienen and Peña labs here at PNI. In both labs, Mike works on the computational analysis of single-cell genomics data. He has a BS in Biochemistry from Brown University and a PhD in Genetics and Genomics from Cornell University, where, under mentor John Lis, he used functional genomics methods to study the mechanisms through which gene transcription is regulated. In his free time, Mike enjoys cooking, music, hiking, and shredding guitar.

Research Specialists

Shannon Bennett

2024 Society for Neuroscience Trainee Professional Development Award
2022 Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology Welcome Initiative Awardee

Shannon is leading research on how thyroid hormone signaling mediates the impact of early life stress on reward circuit development.

Shannon majored in Biology with a concentration in Neuroscience at Penn State. Before joining the Peña Lab, she was an associate scientist at a pharmaceutical company for several years, where she performed in vivo pharmacokinetic studies.

Danielle Roberts

Danielle joined the Peña lab in 2024 to become our lead histology expert and Cell Culture Technician. 

Prior to joining the lab, she worked in Dermatology in both clinical settings and research. She is currently finishing up her Post Baccalaureate Pre-Medical program at Fordham University. 

Danielle completed her BS in Economics from the University of Delaware where she played basketball for the NCAA D1 Women’s Team. 

Graduate Students

Addie Minerva

Jointly advised by Dr. Ilana Witten.

2024 Princeton Procter Fellowship
2021 National Science Foundation GRFP Awardee

Addie is using both single-nucleus RNA-seq and single-cell 2-photon imaging to understand brain reward circuit alterations associated with stress resilience and susceptibility.

Addie majored in Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology with a minor in Predictive Health at Emory University, where she worked with Leonard Howell to investigate the prosocial effects of MDMA. After graduating, she worked with Lisa Gunaydin at UCSF studying how projections from the the prefrontal cortex regulate subcortical areas involved in motivated behavior.

Jovian Cheung

Jointly advised by Dr. Annegret Falkner

2024 National Science Foundation GRFP Awardee

Jovian is interested in how early-life thyroid hormone depletion leads to latent differences in network responses to acute stressors in adulthood. She is examining brain-wide activity, performing in-vivo recordings, and using snRNA-seq to dissect the developmental & acute roles of thyroid hormone in stress responsivity.

She majored in Cognitive Science and minored in Neuroscience at UCLA, during which she worked in Dr. Scott Wilke's lab to investigate the role of the anterior cingulate cortex in effort-based decision making. Outside of the lab, Jovian enjoys contributing to scientific communication and outreach. She also likes art and taking photos of flowers

Siena Dumas Ang

Advised by Dr. Barbara Engelhardt, moonlighting in the Peña Lab

2021 National Science Foundation GRFP Awardee
2019 NPSC Fellow

Siena graduated with a triple degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Dance from the University of Washington. Prior to graduate school, she spent four years at Microsoft Research on the DNA Storage team.

Visiting: Kaitlin Sullivan

2023 Friedman Award for Scholars in Health

Kaitlin is a visiting graduate student from The Cembrowski lab at UBC. She is learning and applying epigenome sequencing approaches to understand how stress alters the 3D structure of DNA across the lifespan.

Rotating:

Undergraduate Students

We welcome interest from Princeton undergraduates hoping to join the lab for research experience and thesis projects, but unfortunately cannot take everyone. The best time to contact Dr. Peña is over the summer or beginning of the Fall when we have turnover in current undergrads and additional mentoring capacity. Priority will be given to students who are able to work in the lab for at least one summer (with OUR/department funding). No experience necessary - just enthusiasm and your time.

Alumni

Postdoctoral Fellows

• Dr. Julie-Anne Balouek (Rodier):
  2019 Cold Spring Harbor Genome Access course scholarship
  2021 Society for Neuroscience Trainee Professional Development Award
  Dr. Balouek is currently a research engineer at the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire in Nantes, France

Graduate Students

• Dr. Sero Toriano Parel:
  2022 Stress Neurobiology Travel Award
  Dr. Parel investigated transcriptomic changes in the brain following early life stress that predict antidepressant treatment response

• Pedro Estrada, MA

Undergraduates

• 2024 Lauren Besch

• 2024 Laura Hirschfield

• 2024 Ella Morgan

• 2023 Luke Geiger (EEB): Office of Undergraduate Research Student Initiated Internship Program (OURSIP) Grant Awardee, 2020
  2022 Princeton Neuroscience Institute Lambert Award; currently a graduate student in Biology at Columbia

• 2023 Cindy Cheng: 2022 Princeton Neuroscience Institute Shapiro Award. Current Physician Assistant student at Weill Cornell

• 2023 Dana Waitman

• 2022 Austin Chang: 2019 Office of Undergraduate Research Student Initiated Internship Program (OURSIP) Grant Awardee; currently a med student at Northwestern

• 2022 Daniel Choo: 2021 Office of Undergraduate Research Student Initiated Internship Program (OURSIP) Grant Awardee; currently a researcher at Harvard

• 2022 Mayowa Oke: 2021 Princeton Neuroscience Institute Lambert Award; Allen Macy Dulles Class of 1951 Award; currently an MD-PhD student at Harvard

• 2022 Megan Tang: 2021 Princeton Neuroscience Institute Shapiro Award; currently a med student at Mount Sinai

• 2021 AJ Chen: PNI Newman/Biousse award; Spirit of Princeton senior award; currently a Physician Assistant student at Wake Forrest

• 2021 Tanzina Islam

• 2021 Parker Jones: currently a med student at Northwestern

• 2021 Christabel Mclain: Brinster Outstanding Neuroscience Senior Thesis Award; Fulbright Fellowship
  Current PhD student: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

• 2020 Kendra Dombroski (MOL): currently a Nutrition MS student at Columbia

• 2020 Anne Elizabeth Sidamon-Eristoff (SPO): Stanley Stein Outstanding Senior Thesis Prize (PLAS); Ricardo Piglia Best Senior Thesis Prize (SPO); Current MD-PhD student at Yale

Summer Interns

• 2024 Bk Kadriu: Psychology major, University of Alaska Anchorage, 2025

• 2022 Anna Kasper: Current PhD student at Penn; BA Rochester Institute of Technology 2023

• 2021 Samaneh Ali: Meyerhoff Scholar M31, Biology major, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2023

• 2021 Christine Wu: Neuroscience and Biochemistry major, Smith College, 2023

• 2020 Amanda Anqueira-Gonzalez: Current PhD student at Columbia University, Neurobiology & Behavior program