Rebecca Tien
Staff Research Associate II
Microbiology and Immunology
Summary
Rebecca is a skilled neurobiologist technician with over 8 years of laboratory experience. Her research focuses on using spatial transcriptomics to understand how gene expression changes in the brain in response to different stimuli, particularly the neural circuits underlying learning and memory. During her time at the Comai Lab at the University of California, Davis, she created and managed multiple transgenic plant lines while assaying for a linearized and integrated mini-chromosome, and at the University of California, Berkeley, she constructed and engineered multiple transgenic plants for disease resistance. At the Deisseroth Lab at Stanford University, she worked on methods for imaging and registering gene expression changes with STARmap. Her work has been featured in Science and Cell; and her Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology from the University of California, Davis has given her a strong foundation in biological research. When not in the lab, Rebecca enjoys playing video games, collecting fountain pens, watching competition shows, and spending time with her furry companions - a 9-year-old German Shepherd named Basil and a 1-year-old cat named Cooper, both of whom she adopted.
Education
B.S. Microbiology and Immunology, UC Davis, 2017
Publications
Allen WE, Chen MZ, Pichamoorthy N, Tien RH, Pachitariu M, Luo L, Deisseroth K. “Thirst Regulates Motivated Behavior Through Modulation of Brainwide Neural Population Dynamics.” Science 364, eaav3932 (2019).
Sylwestrak, E. L., Jo, Y., Vesuna, S., Wang, X., Holcomb, B., Tien, R. H., Kim, D. K., Fenno, L., Ramakrishnan, C., Allen, W. E., Chen, R., Shenoy, K. V., Sussillo, D., & Deisseroth, K. (2022). Cell-type-specific population dynamics of diverse reward computations. Cell, 185(19), 3568–3587.e27.