Alumni

Emily graduated from the West Laboratory with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. She studied traumatic brain injury and neural stem cell therapies for the treatment of stroke. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Georgia with a B.S.A. in Animal Science in 2012. Her research interests include developing innovative treatments for neural injuries by…

Savannah Cheek is a registered veterinary technician from Gwinnett Technical College and has her Assistant Laboratory Animal Technician Certification.

Snook graduated in May 2025 with a Master’s in Animal Science. During his time in the West Lab, he studied the effects of neural stem cell therapy and exercise as a potential treatment for pediatric traumatic brain injury.

Madison earned her neuroscience PhD in the West and Duberstein Labs in 2022. Madison received a BS in Animal Science from North Carolina State University in 2015 and a MS in Animal Science with a focus on Equine Nutrition from University of Georgia in 2018.

Emma is a master’s student in the Interdisciplinary Toxicology Program studying the relationship between traumatic brain injury (TBI) severity and pathology and motor responses.

Erin graduated from the West Laboratory with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. She studied the therapeutic efficacy of novel neuroprotectants and neuroregenerative agents including stem cells, extracellular vesicles and nanoparticles in porcine models of vascular cognitive impairment, stroke, and traumatic brain injury.

Holly earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience in West Lab studying the regenerative and therapeutic effects of induced pluripotent stem cell derived neural stem cells in both in vitro and in vivo models.

As part of the West Lab, Vivian investigated the effect of induced pluripotent stem cell derived neural stem cells on post-stroke recovery using the pig model.

Yubing Liu earned his Ph.D. in 2013 as part of a combined Ph.D. program with Guangxi University, China. As a highly productive member of the lab, he was co-author on multiple manuscripts and was first author on a nice piece on the generation of a novel piPSC line (α-1,3-Galactosyltransferase knockout pig induced pluripotent stem cells:…

Jessica master’s degree work focused on the development of Newcastle Disease resistant chickens utilizing a stem cell approach. Here work culminated in an exciting publication on a novel shRNA approach to knockdown Newcastle Disease Virus (Delayed Newcastle disease virus replication using RNA interference to target the nucleoprotein.). She recently graduated and is now working in…

Trinh’s thesis research focused on the assessment of motor function analysis in stroke pigs. Upon completing her M.S. She began working on a second master’s degree for the development of Apps.

Monika Saini was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the West Lab and was awarded the SERB Indo-US Post-Doctorate Fellowship to do research in at the intersection of metabolomics and neural stem cell therapy.

Dr. Sarah Schantz graduated from the West Lab in May 2025 with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. She studied the effects of neural stem cell, small molecules, and exercise as potential treatments for pediatric traumatic brain injury.

As part of our research team, Kelly studied non-integrating cellular reprogramming, neural stem cell therapies for stroke in a porcine model, and non-invasive in vivo imaging in our pig model. CV

Soo was the West Lab’s first Interdisciplinary Toxicology Program graduate student. She graduated from University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Biotechnology with an emphasis in Animal Science in 2018. She is extremely interested in how different disciplines of science can be integrated to tackle ongoing problems in the field of science…

Ping Yu earned her M.S. in Animal Science in 2012. Ping’s research involved producing chimeric chickens from induced pluripotent stem cells utilizing a non-viral approach.