Meet the Team

lab6resizedAndrew Varga, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is a neuroscientist, board certified in both neurology and sleep medicine. He earned a PhD in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine and subsequently attended medical school at New York Medical College. He completed an internship in Medicine at St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center and a residency in Neurology at Harvard – Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He then completed a fellowship in Sleep Medicine at NY. Dr. Varga has a longstanding interest in mechanisms of learning and memory and the role of sleep in memory consolidation. He has an active research program both on the systems level in human subjects and on the molecular level in collaboration with Dr. Eric Klann at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. His clinical interests involve all areas of sleep medicine with particular interest in movement disorders in sleep (RLS, REM Behavior Disorder), sleep in neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease), and generalized cognitive deficits as a function of fragmented sleep. Please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YLNRzLUedA

 

lab8resizedKorey Kam, PhD, completed his PhD in Neuroscience in the laboratory of Dr. Helen Scharfman at NYU. During his PhD, Korey addressed the relationship between Alzheimer disease (AD) and epilepsy in mouse models of AD and discovered a unique phenotpye of cortical hyperexcitability during REM sleep early in the animal’s life. In the Varga laboratory, Korey will study the role of sleep in learning and memory during normal and pathological aging (in humans and mouse models of AD).

 

 

Natasha Berryman, MA, earned her master’s degree from Fisk University where she sought to understand the molecular mechanisms contributing to the dysregulation of dopamine transporters in the presence of psychostimulants. Now a doctoral student in the neuroscience MTA and a member of the Varga group, her thesis research works to further articulate the role of sleep in motor learning and memory processing. 

 

 

Megan Vetter, earned her BS in Biology from SUNY Binghamton, where she was part of a two year biomedical chemistry research program. Before joining the Varga lab, she worked in the lab of Dr. Daniel Ceradini at NYU Langone Medical Center, which investigates murine wound healing. Currently, she is developing a novel behavior test for investigating memory retention in mice.

 

 

 

Alumni 

wardWard Pettibone received his BS in Neuroscience from NYU. Prior to joining Dr. Andrew Varga’s lab, he investigated memory in mice in the laboratory of Dr. Adam Mar at NYU Langone Medical Center and conducted data analysis in the laboratory of Dr. Wendy Suzuki at the NYU Center for Neural Science. Ward is currently pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

 

 

Rebecca ChenRebecca Chen is currently a high school student at Hunter College High School. In her Science Research Seminar, she found an interest in the effects of sleep deprivation on memory. She will be exploring this interest by working as a summer volunteer in Dr. Andrew Varga’s lab.