Prasad Shirvalkar, MD, PhD
Head of Lab & Associate Professor
Department of Anesthesiology (Pain Management)
Department of Neurological Surgery
Department of Neurology
Weill Institute of Neuroscience, UCSF School of Medicine
B.S., Neural Science, New York University, 2003
M.D., PhD, Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 2012
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Neuroscience, Rockefeller University, 2012
Internship & Residency, New York Presbyterian -Weill Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Neurology, 2016
Clinical Fellowship, University of California San Francisco, Pain Management/Anesthesiology, 2017
Dr. Prasad Shirvalkar is the Principal Investigator of UCSF Clinical Trials for refractory chronic pain (NCT03029884 and NCT04144972) and a neurologist and interventional pain medicine specialist at the UCSF Pain Management Center at Mount Zion. He provides the full spectrum of care for chronic pain conditions, including conservative, nonsurgical treatments such as medications and nerve blocks (anesthetic injections near nerves that are sending pain signals). He also treats patients with advanced neuromodulation therapy by implanting peripheral and spinal cord stimulators, which are devices that relieve pain by sending electrical signals to the spine.
Fun Fact: Prasad was a member of the Oakland Raiders band.
Email: p[email protected]
Co-Investigators
Kristin Sellers, PhD
Assistant Adjunct Professor
Dr. Sellers is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery. She studies intracranial electrical stimulation for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders including major depressive disorder and chronic pain. She works to translate learnings from early stage clinical trials of closed-loop neuromodulation for the development of neurotechnologies and supporting infrastructure.
Julian Motzkin MD, PhD
Assistant Professor
Postdoctoral Researchers
Yiyuan Han
B.Eng, Information Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, 2019
PhD, Computer Science (Neural Engineering), University of Essex, 2023
Yiyuan's research focuses on decoding pain-related states from brain signals. Her primary interests lie in understanding the brain networks underlying pain processing, developing machine learning methods for pain decoding, and advancing closed-loop neuromodulation approaches for chronic pain treatment, particularly through deep brain stimulation (DBS).
Fun Fact: Yiyuan has collected Coca-Cola bottle caps and labels in seven different languages—Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Email: [email protected]
Tess Veuthey, MD, PhD
Tess aims to integrate neuromodulation and psychedelic therapies to develop safe, effective treatments for chronic pain and neuropsychiatric conditions—both in traditional settings and beyond. Her research interests span systems neuroscience, chronic pain, psychedelics, and health disparities. During her PhD, she studied how rodents’ neural representations of movement evolve during motor skill learning and brain–machine interface tasks. Currently, she is leading a trial examining how the neural signature of pain changes during and after psilocybin administration in chronic pain patients.
Fun Fact: Her favorite animal is the capybara, a real-life ROUS known for its calm friendliness and adaptability to diverse environments.
Email: [email protected]
Ritwik Vatsyayan
B.Tech, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, 2018
MS, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Medical Devices and Systems), University of California San Diego, 2024
Ritwik's research centers on modeling the effects of neurostimulation to drive the brain from diseased, high-pain states toward healthy, low-pain states, with a focus on deep brain stimulation. His doctoral work explored tissue damage from microelectrode stimulation and led to the development of novel stimulation paradigms for lower limb rehabilitation in spinal cord injury.
Fun Fact: He is an avid hiker with a healthy dose of acrophobia- loves going up mountains, hates looking down!
Email: [email protected]
Graduate Students
Jeremy Saal
B.S., Cognitive Science, University of California Santa Cruz, 2017
M.S., Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University
Jeremy is currently a graduate student in the Shirvalkar lab, where his research focuses on network analysis and decoding related to chronic pain, as well as investigating the cognitive aspects of pain expectation. His previous work involved decoding navigational features from the hippocampus using intracranial recordings.
Fun Fact: Jeremy was born in the parking lot at Stanford!
Email: [email protected]
Lucille Johnston
B.S., Behavioral Neuroscience, Northeastern University, 2020.
Hailing from the east coast, Lucy entered the UCSF Neuroscience graduate program with a bachelor's of science in behavioral neuroscience from Northeastern University, having worked in labs at Harvard University, New York University, and Columbia University. In the Shirvalkar lab, Lucy is interested in studying the neural underpinnings of the cognitive processes underlying pain processing, including placebo and nocebo.
Fun Fact: In high school, Lucy was in a movie (she has an IMDb page)!
Email: [email protected]
Clinical Research Coordinators
Chad Sitgraves, MS
Email: [email protected]
Catherine Borror
Catherine Borror is a Certified Clinical Research Professional (CCRP) through the Society of Clinical Research Associates (SOCRA) with experience in study design and coordination at UCSF working in the Neurology Department.
Fun Fact: Catherine was in Kidz Bop!
Email: [email protected]
Donna Shahreza
B.S., Molecular Biology, UC Santa Barbara, 2020.
With a background in both academic research and the biotech industry, Donna is excited to apply her diverse experience to support research in DBS for chronic pain as a Clinical Research Coordinator.
Fun Fact: Donna is an avid mountaineer and traveler—in 2023 she spent her summer summitting the highest mountain in the Middle East!
Email: [email protected]
Undergraduate and Rotation Students
Aditya Behal
B.S., Computer Science and Biology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2024.
Aditya is an incoming student in the joint UC Berkeley - UCSF bioengineering Ph.D. program and has worked in the lab for 2 summers. In the summer of 2023, he worked on characterizing the associations between FitBit data (physical activity and sleep) and chronic pain. In the summer of 2024, he was looking at the neural circuitry involved in chronic pain using the single pulse electrical stimulation (stage 0) dataset. Currently, he is investigating the ambulatory evoked potentials dataset to uncover which features best decode chronic pain.
Fun Fact: He was a nationally-ranked chess player in high school!
Email: [email protected]
Lab Alumni
Ryan Leriche
Email: [email protected]
