Hi! I am an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. I completed my PhD with Yang Dan at the University of California, Berkeley, studying brainstem circuits of the sleep-wake cycle. I was then a postdoc in Ilana Witten’s lab at Princeton University. There I studied cortico-striatal circuits of reinforcement learning, and identified sex differences in the relationship between reward and motivation and related differences in the underlying neural circuit mechanisms. An overview of my CV is below.
Education
12/2014 PhD in Vision Science University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Supervisor: Professor Yang Dan
Dissertation: Imaging Sleep-Wake Activity in Identified Pontine Cell Populations
05/2007 Bachelor of Arts with honors in Biological Basis of Behavior, Minor in English, Summa Cum Laude, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Academic positions
09/2025-present Assistant Professor, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Department of Neurobiology
01/2021-08/2025 Research Assistant Professor, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA
Department of Neuroscience, Feinberg School of Medicine
11/2015 – 12/2020 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Supervisor: Professor Ilana Witten
01/2015 – 10/2015 Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA Supervisor: Professor Yang Dan
Awards
2023 NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the BBRF
2023 Shaw Innovation Award
2022 Whitehall Foundation Grant
2017 F32 MH112320 National Research Service Award, National Institute of Mental Health
2016 Selected for T32 Training Program in Quantitative Neuroscience at Princeton University