Bargmann Laboratory Rockefeller University, New York, NY
How do individual cells arrive at cohesive function as an organ in the course of development? We study this question by tracking functional maturation of the nervous system in the nematode C. elegans.
My first steps in research brought me to J.W. Hastings's lab at Harvard to work on bioluminescence, and subsequently to Michael Greenberg's lab at Children’s Hospital Boston, where I worked on the signal transduction of apoptosis and wrote an undergraduate thesis. A seminar on systems neuroscience in my senior year lighted a path of questions that, along with additional training in the labs of Bill Newsome and Krishna Shenoy at Stanford, led to graduate work with Tom Clandinin to initiate a genetic dissection of neural circuits that inform visual behavior. My current work aims to understand the developmental steps that shape circuit function in a complete, mature nervous system.