the DOOR lab Team
We are passionate about creating a more resilient
world through basic science
Opportunities
We can always make room for one more lab rat.
If you are inspired by our research and would like to connect with the team for a chat, please get in touch here. We’d love to hear from you.
Dani Dumitriu MD, PhD
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Dr. Dumitriu is a general pediatrician and neuroscientist
Dani joined Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry) in November 2018, after completing her MD, PhD, pediatric residency, and a fellowship in environmental health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her clinical work is dedicated to caring for newborns as a pediatric hospitalist in the Newborn Medicine Section at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. Dr. Dumitriu's administrative roles include:
Inaugural Director of the Center for Early Relational Health
Chair of Columbia University’s COMBO Initiative
Co-Chair within the WiSE Initiative (Women in Sciences Empowerment), Psychiatry
Co-Funder of the Maternal Child Research Operations (MaCRO) Consortium at Columbia University
Dr. Dumitriu's favorite role is that of Principal Investigator of the DOOR Lab, investigating the neurocircuitry of resilience and mentoring future independent researchers and clinicians.
Our team
Alessia Manganaro, PhD
ASSOCIATE RESEARCH SCIENTIST & LAB MANAGER
2018 - Present
Dr. Alessia Manganaro joined the lab in 2018 to support and manage the basic science component of Dr. Dumitriu research. She supervises and performs technical and administrative functions to assure the experimental design quality, lab members performance and process improvement of all the experiments. Her research interests focus on understanding how divergent behavioral responses to stress emerge in different individuals. Specifically, she investigates the brain code by monitoring online and offline neuronal activity with different cutting-edge techniques.
Andréane Lavallée, PhD
ASSOCIATE research scientist
2018 – Present
After graduating from University of Montreal with a PhD in Nursing, Andréane received a fellowship award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to join the DOOR lab as a postdoctoral research fellow. Her work in the lab is focused on studying parent-child dyadic interactions through the lens of emotional connection. More specifically, Andreane’s work integrates diverse techniques, including machine learning, emerging dynamic analytic methods, and sequential coding applied to parent-infant face-to-face interaction videos to study dyadic parent-infant emotional connection at the mechanistic level.
Perla Ontiveros-Ángel, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
2024 – Present
Dr. Ontiveros-Ángel is a developmental neuroscientist and bioengineer whose research centers on how early-life stress and maternal signals shape the maturation of socioemotional brain circuits. In the DOOR lab, she combines TRAP2-tagged neuronal ensemble mapping, mesoscale cFos imaging, and behavioral neuroscience to investigate how early experiences influence brain-wide stress responsivity and social behavior outcomes. She also investigates Chronic Social Defeat Stress (CSDS) in adult male and female mice, using whole-brain activation patterns to uncover neural signatures of resilience and vulnerability.
Dr. Ontiveros-Ángel is deeply committed to developing translational models of stress, plasticity, and risk that bridge basic neuroscience and clinical relevance.
Lillian Bryan
RESEARCH COORDINATOR
2018 – Present
Lillian Bryan initially joined the DOOR lab as an undergraduate early in her neuroscience degree at Barnard College (Class of 2023). She completed her seniorthesis, Investigating Sex Differences in Biobehavioral Endophenotypes Under DifferentModels of Inescapable Stress, under Dr. Dumitriu, and remained in the lab aftergraduation as a research assistant. She is pursuing an MD-PhD career to coordinate patient care with basic and translational neuroscience research. Her work in the DOOR Lab has ranged from mouse behavioral coding, to runningvarious behavioral stress paradigms, to subsequent tissue pipelines that aim toelucidate brain-wide stress circuitry. She currently heads a project studying how shifts in hierarchical status can affect resilience to social stress.