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Colbran Lab


Current Colbran Lab Members

Principal Investigator

Roger J Colbran

Professor & Interim-Chair, Molecular Physiology and Biophysics Member, Vanderbilt Brain Institute Investigator, Vanderbilt Kennedy Center

Lab Management

Lan Hu

Lan obtained her M.D. in 1990 and continued as an anesthesiologist at Wuhan University before coming to Nashville in 2002. She joined the Colbran lab in 2017.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Jessica Thomas

Jessica is a native of Montgomery, AL. She joined the lab in 2017 after receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Jessica is interested in understanding how alterations in CaMKII activity impacts tactile behaviors to impair social interactions in a mouse model of Autism.

Qian Yang

Qian received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Zhejiang University in 2018, and has been a member of the Colbran lab since November 2019. She is interested in understanding how CaMKII regulates the spatial organization of L-type calcium channels in neuronal plasma membranes, and how this organization is important in controlling gene expression following neuronal activation/depolarization.

Undergraduate Students

Alexandra Duncan

Alex is a sophomore at Vanderbilt University from Saint Louis, Missouri. Alex is double majoring in Neuroscience and Medicine Health and Society with a concentration in Health Behaviors and Health Sciences. Alex has been working in the lab since the fall of 2020 as an undergraduate research assistant working to understand the neuroscience of Learning and Memory through an epigenetic lens. Alex’s project focuses specifically on FOS transcriptional regulation by RNA enhancers and the involvement of calcium signaling and the ERK and CREB transduction pathways.

Bryce Emanuel

Bryce is from Parkland, Florida and is a junior majoring in Neuroscience. They are investigating the role of CaMKIIalpha in tactile behaviors and autism

Michael Goncalves

Michael is a senior at Vanderbilt University from Miami, Florida and is double majoring in Neuroscience and Spanish. He has been working as a member of the Colbran lab since January 2020, and he is primarily interested in understanding how different mutations in CaMKII affect its ability to interact with CaMKII-associated proteins, also known as CaMKAPs.

Tinah Le

I am from Nashville, TN. Currently, I am a junior at Vanderbilt University majoring in Neuroscience. I joined the Colbran Lab in the fall of 2018. I am interested in learning how CaMKIIalpha is involved in the touch pathway. My project is centered around characterizing the expression of c-fos in the somatosensory cortex, where c-fos is used as an indirect measure of CaMKIIalpha activity.