Ben Kottke graduated from Luther College in 2020 with a BA in Biology and Spanish. Ben joined the lab at its creation in November of 2023 and is currently working as a Researcher 2. Along with helping to manage the lab, Ben runs immunohistochemistry projects, develops DeepLab Cut trainers for behavioral assays, and performs in vivo calcium imaging in mouse models of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Previous to the Streng lab, Ben worked in the labs of Dr. Krook-Magnuson and Dr. Ebner learning various techniques to analyze behavior and neural circuitry in mouse models of Essential Tremor, Epilepsy and Traumatic Brain Injury.  Ben left the lab but remained in the UMN Neuroscience community when he entered the Graduate Program in Neuroscience as a PhD student in July 2024!

Vienna is a first-year student in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience working toward her PhD. She rotated in the Streng Lab January-March 2025. She previously attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she earned a BA in Psychology and an MS in Psychology (Behavior Analysis) while working in a behavioral neuroscience lab. Prior to attending the University of Minnesota, she played professional soccer for eight years in Europe. Her research focus is how the cerebellum contributes to nonmotor behavior and higher cognitive function. She intends to study the cerebellum’s structural and functional anatomy, its network connectivity, and its relationship to other brain structures such as the thalamus, striatum, and hippocampus. She is interested in characterizing optimal cerebellar function as well as dysfunction in disorders such as autism and epilepsy.