Lab Partners

Peddie takes pride in its students supporting fellow students- all parties working together to achieve a goal.  It’s a manifestation of our mission to strive for the highest quality of citizenship.

When that mutual support extends beyond campus, that’s cause for even more pride.

Driven by profound personal experience, Kevin Weiner, Ph.D. ’00, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, has mentored several young Peddie alumni and current  students at his UC Berkeley Cognitive Neuroanatomy Lab.

It all began in 2019 when Weiner returned to Peddie for a chapel talk. His brother, Matt ’98, had died of an undiagnosed heart condition in 1999 while a freshman at Princeton University. During those 20 years, Weiner had  become frustrated with the U.S. healthcare system while battling his own series of health conditions. He spent his  first year at UC Berkeley building the infrastructure for his lab while seeing doctor after doctor before being diagnosed with May-Thurner syndrome.

“My own medical saga was unrelated to how Matt died but triggered memories of a prior chapel talk I gave after his death,” he said. “I planned to come back home anyway to visit my parents and Tina (Weiner’s sister, also Class of ’98) for the 20th anniversary of Matt’s death, and thought, ‘Why don’t I give a chapel talk in honor of the anniversary?'”

Science teacher Shani Peretz, Ph.D., contacted Weiner, inviting him to meet with Summer Signature Experience (EXP) students during his visit. Peddie’s EXP program empowers students to design summer internships, enabling them to explore subjects that deeply interest them, gain practical experience and connect with field experts. Weiner graciously accepted the invitation, and Peretz informed him that Chahat Mittal ’20 would be his host for the day.

“Chahat asked me more specifics about what was going on in my lab,” Weiner said. “She was very interested and asked if I would be willing to host her for the summer.” Now at NYU, Mittal joined Weiner at his lab in the summer  of 2019, studying “Evolution, Development, and Behavioral Relevance of Sulci in Lateral Prefrontal Cortex.”

Subsequently, Priyanka Nanayakkara ’22, Szeshuen “Cecilia” Chen ’23, and Yixuan “Kyle” Jia ’24 continued the trend of Peddie students conducting research in Weiner’s lab.

Reyansh Sathishkumar ’21, currently an undergraduate at Berkeley, includes Weiner among their mentors and has collaborated on a published paper with him and Mittal, which Weiner speculates could be the first peer-reviewed neuroscience paper to have three Peddie alumni as co-authors.

Weiner humorously described himself as “competitively uncompetitive” and motivates students by setting and celebrating milestones.

Highlighting the labor-intensive nature of their work, he said, “Our work requires hundreds and thousands of manual, painstaking tracing of indentations in the cerebral cortex known as sulci. Chahat has the record for being the youngest person to define the most sulci in the lab. She identified 863 sulci in six weeks.”

While working alongside Peddie alumni and students, Weiner observed the same solid work ethic and hunger for knowledge that he remembers from his own Peddie experience.

“Peddie was probably the hardest time for me in my academic and athletic career,” he said. “You want to succeed, you want to get into college, you’re motivated, all of the students at Peddie are brilliant- it’s really good training. I think it’s funny and somewhat fortuitous that I spent so many hours staring at the line on the bottom of the pool, and now I spend countless hours staring at lines and patterns on the brain.

“The EXP students are very, very motivated to learn as quickly as possible so they can see the end product,” he continued. “If they have no coding experience, they’re not afraid to be exposed to a Jupyter notebook and have the graduate students go through it with them. The common theme is their motivation, their ability to manage their time really well, and be involved on multiple projects.”

That drive was evident during a lab meeting when Mittal presented her research to peers at UC Berkeley. Weiner offers EXP students the opportunity to practice presenting their findings, preparing them for the presentations they’ll deliver once back at Peddie. Before he finished introducing Mittal at her meeting, the undaunted teenager went straight to the front of the room, then confidently presented and adeptly fielded questions from faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and undergrads.

“Everyone clapped, ‘That was great,’ and I’m like, ‘Slow down!'” laughed Weiner. “You have to acknowledge that no one filtered their questions here, and Chahat is in high school, held her own, wanted to get started as quickly as possible, and gave a kickass presentation. It was very impressive.”

Weiner writes college recommendation letters for all students he’s hosted, boosted with quotes from the grad students who worked directly with them.

“The grad students are shocked that the EXP students are as advanced as they are for high school students,” he said. “And then, because we’ve had such success, when I say we’re going to get another Peddie EXP student, all the grad students are like (raises hand), ‘I’ll mentor them!'”