The five judges below will choose the 1st, 2nd, and 3nd place awardees from among the finalists at the live Grad Slam event on April 2, 2025. A separate set of screening judges reviewed initial video entries and selected the finalists.
Lydia Bell, MA is assistant director of the UCSF Center for Community Engagement, where she collaborates to develop and strategize anchor institution and vendor diversity initiatives, communications, and education outreach. A former Good-Will Ambassador to Taiwan, Lydia’s background also includes counseling teen survivors of abuse and training med students and medical professionals in interdisciplinary and cultural communication skills, bedside manner development, and global health ethics. She has worked in public affairs for a variety of clients, and has assisted in producing/staffing public broadcast Heritage Month celebrations and local hero awards ceremonies. Lydia is a graduate of Princeton University and has a master’s degree in broadcast journalism and electronic communication arts.
Ishan Deshpande, PhD is a principal scientist and group leader at Genentech, where he brings his passion for protein science to bear on the study of inflammatory cell death and signaling. He developed an interest in mechanistic biology during his PhD in the labs of Susan Gasser and Heinz Gut at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland. As a postdoc in Aashish Manglik’s lab at UCSF, he delved into the biology of G protein-coupled receptors using an array of structural, biophysical and biochemical methods. Ishan shared his research to great effect in the 2019 UCSF Postdoc Slam, where he claimed 1st prize for this talk “From One-eyed Sheep to Anti-cancer Drugs”.
Alexandra Klein, PhD is a postdoctoral scholar at UCSF, working with mentor Mazen Kheirbek. She received her bachelor’s degree in biology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and her Master’s degree in Medical Neuroscience at Charité University Medicine in Berlin. During her PhD studies in Nadine Gogolla’s lab at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Munich, she became very interested in interoception and how signals from brain and body, in particular the heart, interact to regulate emotions. In the Kheirbek lab, Alexandra is focusing on the effects of bodily signals on emotional behaviors and how these interoceptive signals are processed in the brain. She won 1st prize in the 2024 UCSF Postdoc Slam with her talk on her research.
Courtney McCormick, PhD ʼ07, is a seasoned life sciences leader specializing in genomics and clinical operations. Most recently she has directed operational programs around immuno-oncology diagnostics at Personalis Inc. Previously she spent six years at Illumina Accelerator launching startups with breakthrough applications in a wide variety of therapeutic, diagnostic, and research fields. She received her PhD in bioinformatics at UCSF, studying under Dr. Patsy Babbitt. She has served as a panelist for awarding SBIR/STTR grants, invested in pre-seed oncology and diagnostics companies, and led student groups at UCSF to support women in research careers. Courtney is the current president of UCSF’s Graduate Division Alumni Association.
Jennifer Nazareno, PhD ʼ15, is the associate dean of graduate programs in the UCSF Graduate Division, where she oversees academic programs, faculty development and support, academic policy development, and student academic support. Before joining UCSF in July 2024, Jennifer was an associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs and innovation at Brown University. She earned her PhD in medical sociology from UCSF, and her master’s and undergraduate degrees from UCLA. Her research and teaching expertise encompass medical sociology, structural and social determinants of health, qualitative methodology, women’s migration, labor, and entrepreneurship.
