PI

Manuel Schottdorf, Ph.D.

Manuel studied physics before completing a Ph.D. at Max Planck in Germany and a Postdoc at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He enjoys developing scientific instrumentation and won numerous awards over the years, among them a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellowship, an Otto Hahn medal, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund’s Career Award. In addition to science, Manuel’s interests include labor rights and he was an organizing committee member for the postdoc union at Princeton.

Find Manuel’s full CV here.    Send Manuel an e-mail.

The team

Mubariz Mohammed

Mubariz began his academic journey in computer science before pivoting toward healthcare research during his master’s in Computational Data Science at UC Riverside. His work focuses on bridging machine learning and biology, with particular interest in building equitable, interpretable models in healthcare and genomics. Mubariz’s multicultural upbringing informs a research philosophy rooted in equity, curiosity, and a deep appreciation for how diverse lived experiences intersect with data and health outcomes. Beyond research, Mubariz enjoys reconnecting with nature through hiking, travelling and exploring new cuisines.

Kathleen Higgins

Kathleen is an Honors dual-degree student in Computer Science and Political Science at the University of Delaware. At Schottdorf Lab, her research focuses on developing an Ordinary Differential Equation Variational Autoencoder (ODE-VAE) to model smooth latent dynamics on low-dimensional neural manifolds and reconstruct neuron firing patterns from calcium imaging data. She is also a researcher at the Sensify Lab, where she conducts human-computer interaction research on misinformation, examining how AI models conceptualize polarizing language in news media. Beyond her research, Kathleen is a coxswain on the University of Delaware’s Division I Women’s Rowing Team, plays jazz piano, and loves board games.

Lindsey Wang

Lindsey is a Eugene DuPont Distinguished Scholar at UD, pursuing dual degrees in electrical engineering and applied mathematics. Her current research focuses on the performance of photomultiplier tubes, a critical component in advanced microscopy. Previously, she has developed image segmentation, registration, and alignment algorithms for large-scale drone-captured images of campus and microscopic lymph node image stacks alike. She hopes to strengthen her knowledge of two-photon microscopy systems to advance various modalities of biomedical imaging while pursuing her Ph.D. In addition to scientific endeavors, Lindsey speaks three languages, plays music, and enjoys going to the gym.

Alums

Dr. SuHyeong Kim, Ph.D. Now with Blackrock Neurotech as a Translational R&D Engineer.