the DOOR lab Team
We are passionate about creating a more resilient
world through basic science
Opportunities
We can always make room for one more lab rat.
If you are inspired by our research and would like to connect with the team for a chat, please get in touch here. We’d love to hear from you.
Dani Dumitriu MD, PhD
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Dr. Dumitriu is a general pediatrician and neuroscientist
Dani joined Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry) in November 2018, after completing her MD, PhD, pediatric residency, and a fellowship in environmental health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her clinical work is dedicated to caring for newborns as a pediatric hospitalist in the Newborn Medicine Section at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. Dr. Dumitriu's administrative roles include:
Inaugural Director of the Center for Early Relational Health
Chair of Columbia University’s COMBO Initiative
Co-Chair within the WiSE Initiative (Women in Sciences Empowerment), Psychiatry
Co-Funder of the Maternal Child Research Operations (MaCRO) Consortium at Columbia University
Dr. Dumitriu's favorite role is that of Principal Investigator of the DOOR Lab, investigating the neurocircuitry of resilience and mentoring future independent researchers and clinicians.
Our team
Christine Austin, PhD
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
2015 - Present
Dr. Austin leads the Tissue Mapping of Environmental Signatures (TiMES) laboratory which focuses on the development of novel biomarkers of stress, early relational health (ERH) and the environmental factors that can impact health and development. She obtained her PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney in Australia and has expertise in analytical chemistry and biomarker development, particularly in the use of spatial sampling techniques. By mapping the spatial distribution of chemicals in tissues, such as teeth, hair and placenta, important information about timing of exposure and co-localizations can be obtained that may shed light on how exposures can disrupt health and development.
Alessia Manganaro, PhD
ASSOCIATE RESEARCH SCIENTIST & LAB MANAGER
2018 - Present
Dr. Alessia Manganaro joined the lab in 2018 to support and manage the basic science component of Dr. Dumitriu research. She supervises and performs technical and administrative functions to assure the experimental design quality, lab members performance and process improvement of all the experiments. Her research interests focus on understanding how divergent behavioral responses to stress emerge in different individuals. Specifically, she investigates the brain code by monitoring online and offline neuronal activity with different cutting-edge techniques.
Andréane Lavallée, PhD
ASSOCIATE research scientist
2018 – Present
After graduating from University of Montreal with a PhD in Nursing, Andréane received a fellowship award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to join the DOOR lab as a postdoctoral research fellow. Her work in the lab is focused on studying parent-child dyadic interactions through the lens of emotional connection. More specifically, Andreane’s work integrates diverse techniques, including machine learning, emerging dynamic analytic methods, and sequential coding applied to parent-infant face-to-face interaction videos to study dyadic parent-infant emotional connection at the mechanistic level.
Perla Ontiveros-Ángel, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
2024 – Present
Dr. Ontiveros-Ángel is a developmental neuroscientist and bioengineer whose research centers on how early-life stress and maternal signals shape the maturation of socioemotional brain circuits. In the DOOR lab, she combines TRAP2-tagged neuronal ensemble mapping, mesoscale cFos imaging, and behavioral neuroscience to investigate how early experiences influence brain-wide stress responsivity and social behavior outcomes. She also investigates Chronic Social Defeat Stress (CSDS) in adult male and female mice, using whole-brain activation patterns to uncover neural signatures of resilience and vulnerability.
Dr. Ontiveros-Ángel is deeply committed to developing translational models of stress, plasticity, and risk that bridge basic neuroscience and clinical relevance.
Lillian Bryan
RESEARCH COORDINATOR
2018 – Present
Lillian Bryan initially joined the DOOR lab as an undergraduate early in her neuroscience degree at Barnard College (Class of 2023). She completed her senior thesis, Investigating Sex Differences in Biobehavioral Endophenotypes Under Different Models of Inescapable Stress, under Dr. Dumitriu, and remained in the lab aftergraduation as a research assistant. She is pursuing an MD-PhD career to coordinate patient care with basic and translational neuroscience research. Her work in the DOOR Lab has ranged from mouse behavioral coding, to runningvarious behavioral stress paradigms, to subsequent tissue pipelines that aim toelucidate brain-wide stress circuitry. She currently heads a project studying how shifts in hierarchical status can affect resilience to social stress.
Sarah Trieu
lab technician
2024 – Present
Sarah Trieu is a lab technician in the DOOR Lab and TiMES Lab, where she works under the mentorship of Dr. Dani Dumitriu and Dr. Christine Austin to help integrate exposomics into the lab’s research on the neural mechanisms of stress and resilience in mice. Her research focuses on optimizing methods to detect biomarkers of inflammation and stress in teeth and hair, with the goal of aligning molecular signatures from human samples with findings from sex-inclusive mouse models of depression. In addition to her work at the bench, Sarah continues the development of MouseCircuits, an open-source platform that aims to foster discovery and collaboration across the neuroscience community. Sarah plans to pursue graduate studies in biomedical sciences, specializing in reproductive science and maternal-fetal health.
Labiba Aziz
UNDERGRADUATE THESIS STUDENT
2023 – Present
Labiba Aziz is an undergraduate research assistant at the Developmental Origins of Resilience (DOOR) Lab, the mouse model counterpart to the COMBO Lab. Her project investigates the role of GABAergic interneurons and perineuronal nets in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala in the face of stress. Labiba graduated from CUNY Queens College in May 2025 and will start her Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at Stony Brook University in the Fall of 2025.
Micaela Oliveira David
Undergraduate Thesis Student
2024 – Present
Micaela Oliveira David is an undergraduate student at Barnard College, pursuing a dual major in Neuroscience & Behavior and Economics. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she moved to New York to begin her academic journey and joined the DOOR Lab in 2024 through the Summer Research Institute (SRI) program. Under the mentorship of Dr. Perla Ontiveros-Ángel, Micaela is conducting her senior thesis research on the neural mechanisms of resilience using a novel Chronic Social Defeat Stress (CSDS) model in rodents. Her project integrates mesoscale whole-brain imaging of neuronal activation with behavioral profiling using keypoint-based modeling approaches to uncover circuit-level predictors of vulnerability and adaptation. Micaela is passionate about translational neuroscience and aims to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience.
Ziao Zhang
master’s Thesis Student
2025– Present
Ziao Zhang is a Master’s student in the Biotechnology program at Columbia University with a growing passion for translational neuroscience. He joined the DOOR Lab in the summer of 2025 to pursue his Master’s thesis under the mentorship of Postdoctoral Research Scientist Dr. Perla Ontiveros-Ángel. His research focuses on investigating the neural mechanisms underlying brain activity and psychiatric vulnerability, with the long-term goal of contributing to the development of novel interventions for mental health disorders. Ziao brings intellectual curiosity and analytical rigor to his work. Outside the lab, he enjoys exploring science fiction through books, films, and video games. In the future, he plans to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience.