Deep Dive Science

Lissa decided she would be a scientist when she was 7 years old. She received a B.S. in Biological Engineering from MIT, and PhD in Neuroscience from Boston University School of Medicine, studying larval zebrafish. She made the jump to studying human beings in a postdoctoral fellowship at the VA Boston Medical Center and Harvard University. Since 2018, she has been working at Cornell University, where she developed and is currently running a large multi-age MRI and pupillometry study to investigate a link between locus coeruleus function, autonomic function, and cognitive aging. She has also formed a partnership with the Community Research Recruitment Accelerator at SUNY Upstate Medical University to develop and maintain community engagement and diverse representation in her research. Outside the lab, she has always felt compelled to research topics of personal interest with the same level of rigor and nuance, and takes special pride in questioning the cultural assumptions and cognitive biases lurking the way we think and live. Raising children (she has two, together with Brian), responding to climate change and identifying what really matters in personal health are topics that motivate her to do her best thinking. She is also a massive science fiction literature nerd, a vipassana practitioner, an avid cook/baker, and moonlights as a classical violinist. She and her family live in an almost-net-zero fossil-fuel-free solar house.

Brian Kardon is a father of two, Dr. Lissa Riley's husband, and a maker at heart. He finds joy in designing and building. He has a B.S. in Physics from MIT, and a Masters of Education from UMass Boston. He taught high school Physics and Biology for six years, during which he enjoyed sharing his love of the universe with hundreds of young people (especially when he could build interesting demonstrations for them). He then accidentally found his way into a neuroscience lab, where he found there were many things that needed to be designed and built. Over the years, he has built up a large repertoire of skills to that end, from programming in various languages, to 3D CAD modelling and 3D printing, to laser cutting, circuit design and printing, and more. He is always eager for the next problem to solve. He also aspires to continually increase how much food he grows in his garden, sails, advocates for expanding public transit, plays the violin, and practices martial arts.

Mark is interested in systems and how their parts come together to form emergent behavior. His training is in physics with an undergraduate degree from MIT and PhD from the University of Maryland in Astronomy. Following graduate studies, he has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY and Cambridge University in the UK. His scientific research centers on the environments in which astrophysical black holes live and gravitationally feed, using supercomputing simulations of these systems to make predictions for how they should appear in the newest generation of telescopes. He is involved in writing the codes used to perform these simulations and their parallelization to enable acceleration using national private and public supercomputing centers. He has more recently started exploring the role of machine learning in the natural sciences, specifically with an application to fluid dynamics. His other interests include sailing, alpinism, and musical performance, a common thread on the Deep Dive team.

Bonnie completed her undergraduate degree at Williams College, where she studied biology and conducted research in muscle physiology. She then worked as a research assistant at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, contributing to iron homeostasis research in genetic and dietary models of iron overload. During this time she also completed the didactic program in dietetics at Simmons College, with the goal of becoming a registered dietitian, motivated in part by her having celiac disease. Bonnie started her Ph.D. in 2016 as part of Cornell’s combined PhD-RD program. She completed the dietetic internship portion of the program and became a registered dietitian in 2018, and was awarded her PhD in human nutrition in 2022 for her research investigating relationships of anti-inflammatory nutrients, genetics, and lung health. In her career, Bonnie hopes to help advance the field of nutrition by researching and developing nutrition recommendations for different populations and states of health and disease, teaching nutrition to future health care professionals, and advocating for the integration of nutrition in primary health care. In her personal life, Bonnie is an avid athlete and food enthusiast. She swam competitively through college and has since transitioned to marathon running and triathlons, and loves spending time in the kitchen, with a focus on plant-forward eating and gluten free baking.