Ryan Alexander completed his BSc at the University of Alberta in his hometown of Edmonton, Canada. He then spent 2 years in Germany pursuing his MSc at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, during which time he first was exposed to patch-clamp electrophysiology in Arthur Konnerth’s lab. Under the supervision of group leader Jana Hartmann, he investigated intracellular calcium signaling in cerebellar Purkinje cells. He then returned to Canada for doctoral studies in the lab of Derek Bowie at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. His primary research focus concerned sodium channel regulation and intrinsic plasticity in cerebellar interneurons, but he also dabbled in AMPA receptor structure-function. He defended his PhD in Neuroscience in November 2019. He is now a postdoctoral scholar in Kevin Bender’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco. His research interests include presynaptic neuromodulation and non-canonical calcium channel regulation, and is currently investigating cell type-specific opioid effects in prefrontal cortex.

Luca is a postdoctoral fellow at the Boston University Medical Center (BUMC). He received his B.Sc. and later his Pharm.D. both form the University of Bologna, Italy. During his Pharm.D., he studied the rationale of the opioid treatment rotation at the University of Paris Descartes in Paris, France. In 2015, after a short intern at the University of Montreal, he pursued his Ph.D. in Psychiatry at McGill University, where he used a mix of behavioral, in-vivo electrophysiology and cellular and molecular biology techniques to study the interaction between the melatonergic and opioid systems in the antinociceptive pathway and reward in the lab of Drs Gabriella Gobbi and Brigitte Kieffer. He received the Fonds de Recherche- Santé du Québec Fellowship and the Edwards Studentship in Pain Research. Luca obtained his PhD in 2020 and continued his studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore as postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Asaf Keller to study the role of monoamines in chronic pain condition using in vivo fiber photometry and electrophysiology. Later he joined the lab of Dr. Stephanie Puig at BUMC where he is investigating the cellular and molecular determinants of the peripheral opioid tolerance.