Roberto Lopez Cervera

UMN MSTP student Roberto Lopex Cervera

Email: lopez927@umn.edu

Entering class: 2017

Education:  
University of California, Santa Cruz
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology major
B.S., 2014

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 
Graduate Program in Neuroscience
Ph.D., 2023

MSTP Student Governance:

  • Student Advisory Committee, 2022-24
  • Student Admissions and Recruitment Committee, 2019-20

Thesis Advisor: Benjamin Hayden, Ph.D.

Thesis Research

Effects of fear, stress, and anxiety on curiosity. People are willing to pay a cost either to receive information they are curious about or to avoid negative information they would like to stay ignorant of. I am interested in studying how information is processed through the neural circuits involved in these behaviors.

Publications (pubmed)

Voloh B, Maisson DJ, Cervera RL, Conover I, Zambre M, Hayden B, Zimmermann J. Hierarchical action encoding in prefrontal cortex of freely moving macaques. Cell Rep. 2023 Sep 26;42(9):113091.  PMCID: PMC10591875

Maisson DJ, Cervera RL, Voloh B, Conover I, Zambre M, Zimmermann J, Hayden BY. Widespread coding of navigational variables in prefrontal cortex. Curr Biol. 2023 Aug 21;33(16):3478-3488.e3. 

Work prior to the UMN MSTP:

Yang J, Lopez Cervera R, Tye SJ, Ekker SC, Pierret C. Adolescent mental health education InSciEd Out: a case study of an alternative middle school population. J Transl Med. 2018 Apr 3;16(1):84. PMCID: PMC5883586

Lee HB, Schwab TL, Koleilat A, Ata H, Daby CL, Cervera RL, McNulty MS, Bostwick HS, Clark KJ. Allele-specific quantitative PCR for accurate, rapid, and cost-effective genotyping. Hum Gene Ther. 2016 Jun;27(6):425-35. doi: 10.1089/hum.2016.011. PMCID: PMC4931339

Westcot SE, Hatzold J, Urban MD, Richetti SK, Skuster KJ, Harm RM, Lopez Cervera R, Umemoto N, McNulty MS, Clark KJ, Hammerschmidt M, Ekker SC. Protein-Trap Insertional Mutagenesis Uncovers New Genes Involved in Zebrafish Skin Development, Including a Neuregulin 2a-Based ErbB Signaling Pathway Required during Median Fin Fold Morphogenesis. PLoS One. 2015 Jun 25;10(6):e0130688. PMCID: PMC4482254

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