Meet the Team
Jon-Paul Pepper, MD
Principal Investigator
Dr. Pepper is the Director of the Stanford Facial Paralysis Center and directs both the scientific and clinical work that is dedicated to improving outcomes after facial nerve injury. He has directed a research lab focused on nerve regeneration since 2013 and moved both his clinical practice and research to Stanford University in 2017. While on faculty at the University of Southern California he was awarded the Research Mentor Award in 2016-17.
Lili He, PhD
Lili is a Life Science Research Professional who completed her PhD in Pathology and Cell Biology at the University of South Florida in 2008. She joined the Pepper Lab in 2019 and is working on vascular imaging of peripheral nerves and the role of endoneurial fibroblasts in nerve graft survival.
Cedric Yu, PhD
Cedric is a Basic Life Research Scientist who joined the Pepper lab in early 2025. He completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine, with a focus in Neurobiology, at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Subsequently, he completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California San Francisco where he focused on the sympathetic nervous system response to radiation-induced damage in epithelial organs. Cedric is currently studying the molecular basis of chronic peripheral nerve injury and repair.
Tannaz Azimi
Tannaz is a Life Science Research Professional who completed her BS in Neuroscience from Santa Clara University in 2022. She joined the Pepper Lab in the Summer of 2022 and is currently working on better understanding peripheral nerve regeneration post-injury through an in vivo model.
Sachin Narayan
Sachin is an MD student at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Southern California and joined the Pepper Lab in the spring of 2024. Sachin focuses on the functional recovery/electrophysiology analysis of mice post nerve injury and coordinates the lab's nerve imaging device studies.
Lab Alumni (mentees)
Chrisa Faniku, PhD
Dr. Faniku completed her PhD in Biomedical Sciences at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Pepper’s lab from 2018 to 2022. Her manuscript, “Hedgehog signaling promotes endoneurial fibroblast migration and Vegf-A expression following facial nerve injury” was published in Brain research in 2021. Her research on this topic was awarded a 1st place prize at the Stanford Bio-X Symposium in 2020 and was presented at the Society for Neuroscience in 2019.
Max Bjorni, BS
Max majored in Neuroscience at Santa Clara University and completed a visiting student rotation in the Pepper Lab in 2019-2020.
Tiffany Wang, MD
Tiffany completed a co-first author publication that described the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells for the derivation of motor neurons. Using a mouse model of sciatic nerve injury, she successfully transplanted and engrafted these cells into immunodeficient mice. Her work was published in a JAMA-series publication. She matched at a highly competitive and sought after residency position in Otolaryngology at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, where she is completing her clinical training.
Gabriela Bobarnac, MD
Gabby focused her work as Dean’s scholar on the injury-responsive mesenchyme in the mouse facial nerve. She described a population of endoneurial fibroblasts in the facial nerve that proliferate after injury and replenish the injury site and the perineurium of the injured nerve. Her work was accepted for publication by Experimental Neurology and was featured on the cover of Volume 303 in 2018. She matched into a highly competitive residency position in Otolaryngology at the Oregon Health and Sciences University.
Ali Mottaghi, Graduate Student
Ali Mottaghi is a 5th-year PhD student working on AI in Healthcare. He is also part of the Medical AI and Computer Vision Lab (MARVL). Ali is interested in developing new computer vision algorithms for more efficient and accessible healthcare delivery.
Dhara Dave, MS (Masters of Science)
Dhara is a visiting research scholar and a pharmacist by profession. Dhara completed MS in medical biotechnology with thesis project on peripheral nerve regeneration and BS in pharmaceutical sciences. Dhara joined Pepper lab in October 2023 and focuses on developing microenvironment for nerve guide conduit for faster peripheral nerve regeneration. Dhara is currently working on molecular biology techniques and cell-based assays to study role of nerve fibroblasts.