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Jessica Minder PhD

Postdoctoral fellow

Dr. Minder completed her PhD in neuroscience at NYU in the labs of Rob Froemke and Moses Chao, identifying a neural circuit and hormonal pathway for diapause in rodents, in a first-author paper published in Science Advances. She completed a brief postdoc in Andrea Gomez's lab at UC-Berkeley, then joined the AshLab at UCSF in November 2025. Dr. Minder's primary project is to develop novel methods to noninvasively restore synaptic plasticity in disorders of excessive synaptic stability using transcranial focused ultrasound targeted biologics.

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Martin T. W. Scott PhD

Postdoctoral fellow

Dr. Scott  has a PhD in neuroscience from York University, where he recieved training in EEG and psychophysics with thesis mentor Alex Wade. He pursued a postdoc with Anthony Norcia at Stanford exploring high-density EEG steady-state visual evoked potentials as a diagnostic tool in glaucoma. Martin then joined Dr. Ash's research group to develop transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation approaches in the human subcortical visual pathway, initially at Stanford and now at UCSF.

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Patti N. Limon

Neuroscience Research Coordinator

Patti has a BS in psychology from UC-Irvine and has been a key member of Dr. Ash's research group at Stanford and UCSF since 2023. Patti's primary research project is to study how visual spatial attention modulates visual cortical plasticity measured by high-density EEG in human participants. She also performs in-human transcranial focused ultrasound studies. Patti plans to pursue PhD training in neuroscience or bio-engineering, matricualting Fall 2026.

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Ryan Ash, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor in Residence

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I am a psychiatrist and neuroscientist focused on translational neuroscience research. My lab’s overall goal is to implement image-guided transcranial focused ultrasound (FUS) technologies to rebalance synaptic stability and plasticity in the brain, as a treatment for disorders of excessive neural circuit stability including autism, OCD, Tourette, addiction, and PTSD. FUS has high spatial resolution (up to ~1 mm) that can be shaped to the target structure, can modulate neural activity through its impact on mechanosensitive ion channels, and can target biopharmaceuticals into the brain.