About
Gema graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2012 with a B.S. in Biopsychology and minor in Spanish. She started her research career studying the neurobiology of drug addiction in Dr. Tod Kippin’s lab, but while there developed her interests in the etiology of neurological disease. After graduation, she worked in Dr. Kippin’s lab as a Junior Research Specialist until 2014, and subsequently pursued a variety of interests outside of the research field until deciding to return to science in 2017, when she joined industry to work at a behavioral pharmacology company.
In 2018 she joined Dr. Lawrence Goldstein’s lab at UC San Diego as an intern for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), where she studied the intracellular dynamics of Alzheimer’s Disease’s (AD) amyloid precursor protein (APP) using a stem cell models of AD. Her experiences here led her to join the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (INP) at UC Irvine in 2019, where she hoped to find the perfect lab to further develop her burgeoning interests on the interplay between immunology and neurodegenerative disease. Accordingly, she joined Lane Lab summer of 2020 where she is currently working on studying the neuropathology behind SARS-CoV-2 and the pathology of Multiple Sclerosis using the Lane Lab viral model of neurodegeneration.
Gema is a charismatic individual who loves speaking in third-person, science, community-outreach work, spending time with her family and friends, and hiking/biking/beaching with her boyfriend.