Dr. Sashi Kesavapany is Director of The Collaboratory. He possesses over 20 years of post-PhD experience in academic neuroscience research and five and a half years of pharmaceutical drug discovery experience in neurodegenerative diseases. His academic and industrial experience places him in an excellent position to translate PI-driven research at Marquette into commercial assets.

 

 

 

Nick Raddatz is Manager of The Collaboratory. Raddatz has extensive experience in laboratory management and research spanning over a decade. He has served as a Laboratory Supervisor in the Baker Lab at Marquette University since 2010, where he guides and mentors staff in various scientific techniques and maintains the lab's overall day to-day operations. In his prior role at Array BioPharma, he provided bioanalytical support, worked with HPLC-MS/MS systems, and contributed to drug metabolism studies.

 

 

Dr. Dan Wheeler is Lead In Vivo Specialist at The Collaboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Ralph Miller's lab at SUNY Binghamton and was a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Holland's lab at Johns Hopkins University. He has expertise using a variety of in vivo and in vitro measures of electrochemical neural activity to examine the physiological intersection of stress and addiction .

 

 

 

Dr. Robert Twining is lead statistician and in vivo specialist at The Collaboratory. He received his Ph.D. from the Penn State College of Medicine where he studied interactions between motivation and drug-seeking behavior. His current research interests focus on an interdisciplinary approach encompassing ingestive behaviors, fear conditioning, models of PTSD, and transitions from motivated behaviors to habitual actions.

 

 

 

Michael Szymanski is a technician specialist at The Collaboratory focusing on in vitro assay development. He graduated from Marquette University with a degree in Biomedical Sciences in 2023. He is primarily interested in how monoamine and stress hormone signaling pathways affect neurons and glia cells.

James Hightower is a technician specialist at The Collaboratory. He graduated in 2023 from Marquette University with a degree in Biomedical Sciences. He currently focuses on the design and execution of genotyping projects. He is interested in pursuing a career in surgery in the future.