Parastoo (Parry) Hashemi
Principle Investigator
Parry received her MSci degree in Chemistry from King's College, London. She performed her PhD with Martyn Boutelle in the Department of Bioengineering in Imperial College, London where she developed online biosensing technology to measure brain metabolites from human traumatic brain injury patients. After her PhD she skipped over the pond to Chapel Hill where she worked with Mark Wightman. Here she learned fast scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) at carbon-fiber microelectrodes (CFMs) and developed the first method to measure serotonin in vivo using FSCV. She currently has labs at USC and Imperial. Parry and her team tackle some of the world's most pertinent issues with analytical engineering and have a long list of accolades attesting to their success. Outside of her work and her family, Parry loves cities, champagne, dogs, exercise, design and fashion, literature and learning how to make the local cuisine of all the places in which she's lived (including killer Carolina BBQ).
Ginger Hashemi
Hashemi Lab Consultant
Ginger (Gingy) Hashemi is a founding member of the lab, and provides boundless positive energy to lab members. Her primary role has been to elevate lab member's serotonin levels, which she does with resounding success, likely via an oxytocin mediated mechanism. Parry has had multiple offers/threats from others to buy/steal her. Nonetheless, Gingy's destiny is to serve the psychological health of the Hashemi lab and she can't imagine any higher calling. Ginger cannot catch a ball thrown slowly and deliberately to her, yet will catch a bread-crumb traveling at the speed of light. In her youth, Gingy loved to train for marathons with Parry, running for hours in the woods with her tail awaggin' and her tongue ahangin'; chasing smaller animals (much to her detriment when those animals happened to be skunks or porcupines). These days our old girl is content with just a short stroll, giving and getting lots of cuddles (Gingy is a great proponent of canine intervention therapy), followed by 16 hrs of sleep.