Dr. Marchetto is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC San Diego. She received her PhD in microbiology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2005 before completing a five-year postdoctoral fellowship in neurobiology and neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA. Before joining UC San Diego, she worked as a staff scientist in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute, where she led projects studying neuronal development using human and nonhuman primate stem cells. She now supervises projects using induced pluripotent stem cell models from humans and nonhuman primates to study brain development, aging, and evolution, as well as how human-specific cellular features shape both brain function and vulnerability to disease.
Email: [email protected]

Dr. August is a postdoctoral researcher in the Marchetto Lab. She received her BA in the liberal arts from St. John's College, Annapolis in 2018, her MA in anthropology from UC San Diego in 2020, and her PhD in anthropology from UC San Diego in 2026. Her research explores the evolutionary origins of human vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease using human and nonhuman primate neuronal models. As a postdoc, she leads a project examining species differences in tau toxicity and endogenous tau secretion as potential upstream drivers of human disease vulnerability and assists in mentoring current graduate students in the lab. 
Email: [email protected]