Meet Our Team
Lot de Witte (MD PhD)
Nijmegen, Netherlands
Lot received a PhD in cell biology and immunology in 2008, and her MD in 2010 at the VU medical centre, Amsterdam. She was trained as a psychiatrist and developed her own research line studying immune mechanisms of psychiatric diseases at the UMC Utrecht. In 2017 she moved to New York to set up her lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In 2022 she received a Hypatia Fellowship to continue her research and clinical work at the Radboud UMC The Netherlands.
Raphael Kubler (MSc)
New York, USA
Raphael received a master’s in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht in 2020. He joined the lab as an intern in 2020, after which he continued as a research associate. The aim of his project is to set up novel genomics platforms to study microglia in different types of brain disorders. He is an expert in nuclei isolation, nuclei sorting and sn-RNA-seq data analysis.
Frederieke Gigase (MSc)
New York, USA
Frederieke did a master’s in Neuroscience and Cognition at the University of Utrecht, and a master’s in Clinical Psychology at the University of Leiden. She joined the lab at the Icahn School of Medicine as a research associate and worked on setting up the IPSC and organoid cultures. She is currently doing her PhD on immunology during pregnancy, with a main focus on immune marker patterns throughout gestation, and the association with infection, obstetric outcomes and postpartum mental health.
Mara Graziani (MSc)
New York, USA
Mara received her master’s in Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Maastricht in 2020. She joined the lab at Icahn School of Medicine as a research associate in 2021. The aim of her project is to study the role of the immune system in neurodevelopmental disorders. She has expertise in iPSC modelling of brain diseases.
Alice Buonfiglioli (PhD)
New York, USA
Alice received her Master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the University of Bologna. She obtained her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Charité - University Hospital in collaboration with the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin. During her graduate studies she investigated the role of microglia in glioma using in vitro as well as in vivo approaches. She joined the lab in 2021 and her current work focuses on developing an immune-competent cerebral organoid model that can be used to study microglial functions in neurodevelopment and neuro-pathologies and Psychiatric Disorders.
Annika Mordelt (MSc)
Nijmegen, Netherlands
Annika received her master’s in Neuroscience at the Donders Institute and joined the lab as a PhD student in 2022. She is developing platforms to model neuro-immune interactions using human stem cells. The aim of her project is to monitor synapse elimination by microglia in health and disease.
Tarek Khashan (BSc)
Nijmegen, Netherlands
Tarek Khashan received his Bachelor of Science in Psychology at the West University of Timisoara. He joined the lab as an Intern Research Associate in 2022. The aim of his project is investigating the role of microglia in Rett Syndrome using patient derived pluripotent stem cell-based model. He has expertise in iPSC modelling, post-mortem human brain cell isolation and cell-based functional assays.