THE RESEARCHERS

Dr. Steven Hamilton: Dr. Hamilton is a psychiatrist and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his PhD in Biological Chemistry and MD from the University of California, Los Angeles.  He was a psychiatry resident and research fellow at Columbia University.  Dr. Hamilton's research focuses on identifying the genetic determinants of behavior.  More information about projects in the laboratory can be found here.

Dr. Karen Overall: Dr. Overall is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists and certified by the Animal Behavior Society as an Applied Animal Behaviorist.  Dr. Overall received her VMD degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, completed a residency in behavioral medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, and holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin.  After running the Behavior Clinic at Penn Vet for more than a dozen years, Dr. Overall is now a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry and Center for Neurobiology & Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Overall is author of the authoritative textbook entitled Clinical Behavioral Medicine for the Small Animal by Mosby, and her text, Manual of Veterinary Behavioral Medicine is in press.  Overall is the editor-in-chief of the new Elsevier journal in the field, Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research.

Dr. Melanie Lee Chang: Dr. Chang is a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Hamilton's laboratory at UCSF.  She holds PhDs in physical anthropology and ecology/evolutionary biology from the University of Pennsylvania, with primary research interests in systematics and phylogenetically-informed reconstructions of character evolution and population history.  At this time, Dr. Chang's primary canine project is investigating the genetic background of noise phobia in Border Collies.  She has three Border Collies of her own, Solo, Fly, and Jett, with whom she has trained and competed in agility, flyball, and sheepdog trialing.  Dr. Chang is an avid amateur photographer. Her dogs have their own home page here.

Dr. Soraya Juarbe-Diaz: Dr. Juarbe-Diaz received her B.S and DVM degrees from Cornell University.  After seven years in private practice she returned to her alma mater and completed a behavioral medicine residence, becoming board certified in 1997.  Certification by the Animal Behavior Society as a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist was conferred in 1999.  She ran the Clinical Behavior clinic at two vet schools, first at the University of Florida and then at the University of Tennessee, while maintaining a behavior referral practice in Florida, a service she has provided since the fall of 1997.  Dr. Juarbe-Diaz serves on various committees of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists and is the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research.  Her interests include behavioral disorders in domestic species and animal cognition in particular.  Her house is a home thanks to a rescue dog, cat and horse.

Jennifer S. Yokoyama: Ms. Yokoyama is a doctoral candidate in the Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics program at UCSF. She received a bachelor’s degree in Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Genetics and Development from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to entering UCSF, Ms. Yokoyama spent nearly two years as a laboratory technician at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute near Tokyo, Japan. As a graduate student in the Hamilton lab, her dissertation work will concern the genetic and biological background of noise phobia in dogs. She is also the lead researcher for fear aggression studies. In her spare time, Jennifer enjoys eating, laughing very loudly and hanging out with her friends, family and her geriatric mixed breed dog, Molly.

Essential literature can be found here.