Mike Gordon

Associate Professor

Mike is a member of the Department of Zoology, Life Sciences Institute, and Centre for Brain Health. He completed his BSc at McMaster University, where he worked on signal transduction during development; his PhD at Stanford, working on Wnt signaling; and his postdoc at UC Berkeley, working on fly taste circuits. A full list of Mike’s publications can be found on Google Scholar.

Kevin (Yihang) Pan

Postdoctoral Fellow

Kevin received his PhD from University of Ottawa, where he worked on breathing regulation in larval zebrafish. In the Gordon lab he is working to uncover novel ligand-receptor interactions in insects.

Sasha McDowell

PhD Candidate

Sasha is a graduate student in Zoology. She received her BSc from McGill, where she worked on a mouse model of cerebellar ataxia. In the Gordon lab, Sasha is working on the mechanisms of salt taste detection, including a recent discovery of a novel high salt receptor.

Jinfang Li

PhD Candidate

Jinfang is a graduate student in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. She received her BS from UC San Diego, where she worked on imaging neural activity in freely moving flies and dissecting the circuits underlying trace learning. In the Gordon lab she is working on coding in higher-order taste neurons.

Melissa Armstrong

PhD Candidate

Melissa is a graduate student in Zoology. They received a BFA from Rhode Island School of design and worked as an artist, designer, and sculpture conservator before starting a PhD at UBC studying the neuroscience of visually guided flight in birds. THey are now working on an interdisciplinary thesis that analyzes the data they generated in the lab with artistic tools and processes rather than statistical ones.

Elsa Cyr

MSc Student

Elsa is a graduate student in Zoology. She received her BSc from UBC, where she worked on visually guided flight behaviours in birds. She now works in the Gordon and Matthews labs trying to understand taste coding in mosquito legs.

Janet (Mengyi) Zhao

MSc Student

Janet is a graduate student Zoology. She received her BSc from McGill, where she worked on several neuroscience projects including trying to understand the effects of olfactory stimulation on stress-induced analgesia in lab mice. In the Gordon lab she is working on higher brain circuits involved in salt preference.

Victoria Lee

Undergraduate Student

Victoria is an undergraduate in the UBC Biology program. She works with former postdoc Molly Stanley on a poorly understood population of taste neurons.

Lisa Guo

Undergraduate Student

Lisa is an undergraduate in the CAPS program. She has been working on higher brain circuits controlling salt preference.

Gurleen Nirwal

Undergraduate Student

Gurleen is a USRA student working to understand taste preferences in flies and mosquitoes.