Fishman Lab

Mark C. Fishman, M.D.

Mark C. Fishman studies the social behavior of zebrafish, focusing on the genetic, neuronal, and developmental aspects of group behavior.

Emily Voce

Emily Voce is the Faculty Coordinator for the Fishman and Hsu laboratories.

I received my Ph.D in Molecular Biology from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. I was then a research fellow at the Firc Institute of Molecular Oncology in Italy and then completed my post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Len Zon at Harvard, working on melanoma using zebrafish as model system. Currently, I am staff scientist in the Fishman Lab at HSCRB, and I am particularly interested in modeling social behavior in zebrafish using genome editing techniques.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Ariel Aspiras, Ph.D.

I received my Ph.D in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard University, where I worked on identifying genetic variation that underlie metabolic variation among distinct populations. I’m currently a post-doc in Mark Fishman’s lab working to identify genes that control emergent behaviors and to characterize the neural circuits that are modulated in response to genetic variation.

Yasuko Isoe, Ph.D.

I am a post-doc in the lab of Florian Engert. My research interests are in the ontogeny and species-diversity in the social behavior. I am comparing the social behavior of zebrafish and medaka, fish which, as adults, show very different collective behaviors. I have found behavioral differences even as larvae. The relative simplicity and transparency of the embryos permit me to model the behaviors and to use cellular imaging to dissect the underlying neural activity. My hope is that these experiments will illuminate the mechanisms and evolutionary diversity of social decision-making.

Armin Bahl, Ph.D.

I am a postdoc in the lab of Florian Engert at Harvard University and generally interested in how nervous systems compute and control behavior. In my work, I seek to understand the neural basis of perceptual decision-making, using the larval zebrafish as a model. Through a combination of behavioral experiments, calcium imaging, anatomical analyses, and computational modeling, I hope to unravel some general principles of the behavior that can also be tested in other animal models.

Roy Harpaz, Ph.D.

My research at the Engert Lab focuses on understanding how brains generate natural and complex social behaviors. Specifically, I use behavioral analysis, functional imaging and mathematical modeling to study the neural circuits underlying social behavior in wildtype and mutant zebrafish over development. The results of my study will allow me to understand how complex social behaviors are represented in the brain and to link genetic mutations that effect social behaviors to changes in these neural representations.