I am an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the department of Integrative Biology and Physiology at UCLA.

In my career I have had the opportunity to study different aspects of neuroscience and cancer science. In the van Veen lab we are integrating these interests to study how cancer and its therapies affect the nervous system and reciprocally how the nervous system affects tumor development. As a graduate student I examined the guidance factors that steer axons and orchestrate the development of the nervous system. As a post-doc I built and studied mouse models of BRaf driven lung adenocarcinoma. As a project scientist, I moved back into neuroscience, studying how hormone sensitive hypothalamic nuclei regulate physiology, using single cell RNA sequencing and stereotaxic microinjection targeting particular neuronal sub-types. Most recently I co-supervised a project, that bridges the gap between cancer, neuroscience, and physiology. We established mice as a model for studying many of the deleterious side effects of the chemotherapeutic, tamoxifen, and demonstrated that tamoxifen induced changes in temperature, bone density, and movement are all mediated by estrogen receptor positive cells in the hypothalamus.