1. Office of Postdoctoral Affairs
Robin Chemers Neustein

Robin Chemers Neustein Postdoc Fellowship Award

The Robin Chemers Neustein Postdoctoral Fellowship supports outstanding postdoctoral research scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Established in 2010, the fellowship has recognized more than 20 exceptional scientists to date and has recently been reimagined to expand its impact over the coming decade, with multiple awards to be granted each year. Open to all eligible senior postdoctoral scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine, the fellowship provides a one-year $40,000 award to individuals who have demonstrated high-impact accomplishments in the biomedical sciences and show strong potential for an independent scientific career. Made possible through the generous support of Robin Chemers Neustein, this prestigious fellowship reflects a continued commitment to advancing excellence in scientific research and supporting the next generation of scientific leaders.

About Robin Chemers Neustein

Ms. Neustein attended Mount Holyoke College, earned her B/A/ from Brown University, and received a joint J.D./M.B.A. from Northwestern University. She joined Goldman Sachs in 1982, was made a General Partner in 1990, and became a Senior Director in 2002. Over the course of her distinguished career, Ms. Neustein was an investment banker, a member of the firm’s key governance bodies, chaired the Private Equity Group, served as the firm's chief of staff through its last decade as a private partnership, and became an executive officer when Goldman Sach went public.

Ms. Neustein has a penchant for engaged philanthropy as is evidenced by her creation of several programs at Mount Sinai including the RCN Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Mid-Career Development Program, the Senior Leadership Development Program, the COVID Emergency Fund and the Neustein Research Fund. She was a member of Mount Sinai’s Board of Trustees from 1998-2015, and served as the inaugural Chair of the Graduate School Committee which is now part of the Education Committee of the Board. Ms. Neustein continues to serve on the Education Committee.

She is a Life Trustee of Northwestern University; Trustee Emerita of Mount Holyoke College and Brown University; President Emerita and Honorary Trustee of American Ballet Theatre; Vice Chairman of Rockefeller University; and a member of the Management Committee and Executive Board of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Past Award Winners

Fellowship Award Winners

image of Xuanming (David) Guo

Xuanming (David) Guo
2026 Winner

Xuanming (David) Guo, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), in the laboratory of Dr. Scott J. Russo. His research focuses on how chronic psychosocial stress drives brain-reactive autoantibodies that engage the brain border and contribute to neurovascular dysfunction and depressive-like behavior. During his PhD at Hong Kong Baptist University, he published first- and co-first-author studies in Nature Metabolism and Nature Communications on membrane protease regulation of metabolic and immune signaling, and he is a 2026 FBI Postdoc Innovator Award recipient.

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Xuanming (David) Guo
2026 Winner

Xuanming (David) Guo, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), in the laboratory of Dr. Scott J. Russo. His research focuses on how chronic psychosocial stress drives brain-reactive autoantibodies that engage the brain border and contribute to neurovascular dysfunction and depressive-like behavior. During his PhD at Hong Kong Baptist University, he published first- and co-first-author studies in Nature Metabolism and Nature Communications on membrane protease regulation of metabolic and immune signaling, and he is a 2026 FBI Postdoc Innovator Award recipient.

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Saren Seeley
2026 Winner

Saren H. Seeley, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). In the Center for Computational Psychiatry, she investigates how neural computations of emotion, learning, and decision-making give rise to persistent, difficult-to-control patterns of thinking and behaving – or conversely, support resilience and recovery -- in prolonged grief disorder, PTSD, and eating disorders. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging (as an F31 fellow), the National Institute of Mental Health (as a T32 fellow), and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

image of Xuanming (David) Guo

Xuanming (David) Guo
2026 Winner

Xuanming (David) Guo, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), in the laboratory of Dr. Scott J. Russo. His research focuses on how chronic psychosocial stress drives brain-reactive autoantibodies that engage the brain border and contribute to neurovascular dysfunction and depressive-like behavior. During his PhD at Hong Kong Baptist University, he published first- and co-first-author studies in Nature Metabolism and Nature Communications on membrane protease regulation of metabolic and immune signaling, and he is a 2026 FBI Postdoc Innovator Award recipient.

image of Saren Seeley

Saren Seeley
2026 Winner

Saren H. Seeley, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). In the Center for Computational Psychiatry, she investigates how neural computations of emotion, learning, and decision-making give rise to persistent, difficult-to-control patterns of thinking and behaving – or conversely, support resilience and recovery -- in prolonged grief disorder, PTSD, and eating disorders. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Aging (as an F31 fellow), the National Institute of Mental Health (as a T32 fellow), and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

image of Yuan Cheng

Yuan Cheng
2026 Winner

Yuan Cheng, PHD is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Herbert Zheng Wu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Cheng’s research seeks to understand how the brain enables individuals to coordinate their behavior and achieve successful cooperation in complex social environments. To address this question, he developed a novel mouse cooperative paradigm that elicits spontaneous emergence of distinct leader and follower roles. Using this model, Dr. Cheng revealed asymmetric neural representations encoding the role dynamics and, together with computational modeling, linked these representations to the internal goals that guide social interactions. His work provides a new framework for understanding how the brain organizes coordinated social behavior and may offer new insights into social dysfunction in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. Through the Robin Chemers Neustein Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr. Cheng will further investigate how social roles emerge through social interaction and how the brain encodes and updates these roles during cooperative behavior.