Shirley Cai

Shirley Cai

Shirley is a first year PhD student in the Neurobiology and Behavior program at Columbia University. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in Biology: Neuroscience and Psychology in 2021, where she studied both molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases and risk factors for early-adolescent depression onset using neuroimaging data. She spent another two years developing and validating CSF and plasma biomarkers for early Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis. She is now interested in elucidating mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric diseases, especially schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.