People

Li-Feng Jiang-Xie, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator
Assistant Professor of Neuroscience
University of Pennsylvania
Li-Feng was born in Taiwan, a beautiful island bordering the Pacific Ocean. Since his teenage years, he has been passionate about literature, history, and science. He received his education at National Taiwan University, focusing on brain and cognitive sciences. He later traveled to the United States and earned his Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Duke University. He is deeply fascinated by the biological basis of sleep, dreams, and consciousness. He strongly believes that the best science is a harmonious marriage of logic and imagination, and he aspires to create a laboratory that reflects this philosophy. He was honored with the Outstanding Early Investigator Award (2020) from the Sleep Research Society and the Bold Pioneer Award (2024) from WashU Medicine. His research has been highlighted twice in the NIH Director’s Blog (Francis Collins, 2019 & Monica Bertagnolli, 2024), garnered extensive media coverage, and been featured on German television. In his leisure time, he enjoys acquiring new knowledge, traveling, exploring new restaurants, and appreciating art.


Owen Woodward
Research Specialist
University of Pennsylvania
Owen is from Philadelphia and holds a BS in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At UMass, he was first introduced to neuroscience research by Dr. Rebecca Spencer and the Somneuro Lab. As an undergraduate researcher, he explored the neural mechanisms involved with aging-related changes in the benefits of sleep. Owen is interested in the neuroscience of sleep and its relationship to neurodegenerative diseases. He is also motivated by the potential for science to contribute to the development of health interventions. He later plans to attend graduate school and pursue a career in research. Outside of the lab, Owen enjoys all things baseball, playing video games, and discovering new music. 


Andrea Jihee Nam, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Scholar
University of Pennsylvania
Andrea was born and raised in Hong Kong, but is originally from South Korea. She holds a B.A. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania and earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience along with a Master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Texas at Austin. At UT Austin, she worked with Dr. Kristen Harris to investigate how the three-dimensional organization of the tripartite synapse changes during long-term potentiation and long-term depression in the dentate gyrus. She is interested in how the structure and function of neural circuits support complex processes such as sleep, memory formation, and information integration. Outside of the lab, Andrea loves running, biking, listening to music, and starting new craft projects. 


Kesshni Bhasiin
MD/PhD Student
Hello! I'm Kesshni - a second year MD/PhD student in the Neuroscience Graduate Group here at Penn. During my undergraduate years at Mount Holyoke College, I worked in a lab studying glial cells in neurodegenerative disease and quickly realised how much I loved thinking about the brain and that understanding its basic biology would eventually be crucial to helping patients and families faced with neurological disease. I then spent my gap years at Washington University in St. Louis where I studied fluid dynamics and the role neurons play in regulating these fluid waves in the brain - an avenue that sparked further interests in systems neuroscience, information processing and why the spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain have evolved as they have! For my PhD, I am hoping to investigate questions along these lines and continue working with Dr. Jiang-Xie and the incredible people in lab!