Alan Kanzer Sponsors Unique, New Postdoctoral Program
Gift to support world-class postdoctoral scientists pursuing bold approaches to the study of mind, brain and behavior
The Alan Kanzer Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University provides an opportunity for talented early-career scientists to pursue pioneering research into understanding the brain. Fellows become integral members of the Institute's vibrant intellectual community and have access to broad-ranging collaboration opportunities. Fellows have backgrounds in a variety of disciplines and are encouraged to carry out multidisciplinary research under the mentorship of one or more faculty members.
Hayley Bounds, PhD, (she/they)
PhD Institution: Stanford University
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Attila Losonczy and Dr. Stefano Fusi
Biography: As a PhD student in the Adesnik Lab at UC Berkeley, Hayley used new optical techniques to understand a question in neuroscience: how the activity of cells in the brain leads to perceptual experience. She used 2-photon optogenetics to control the activity of individual neurons in a live animal and tested how activating cells with different functional properties impacts whether the animal can detect a difficult-to-see stimulus. She found that the functional type of the cell did not predict its impact on behavior, but its influence on neighboring cells did. This result challenges long-held beliefs about the brain and supports newer, population code based theories. She will be starting at ZI this fall and will be working with Dr. Attila Losonczy and Dr. Stefano Fusi to understand how circuits in the hippocampus support behaviorally-relevant spatial memory formation and maintenance. She will investigate how the behavioral relevance of cues and locations shapes how hippocampal neurons acquire and maintain selectivity for these cues and locations. This spatial selectivity in hippocampal neurons is thought to be the neural implementation of spatial episodic memory. She will then investigate the circuit, neuromodulatory, and cellular/synaptic mechanisms of behaviorally relevant memory formation.
Summary of Research: Hayley will be working with Dr. Attila Losonczy and Dr. Stefano Fusi to understand how circuits in the hippocampus support behaviorally-relevant spatial memory formation and maintenance. She will investigate how the behavioral relevance of cues and locations shapes how hippocampal neurons acquire and maintain selectivity for these cues and locations. This spatial selectivity in hippocampal neurons is thought to be the neural implementation of spatial episodic memory. She will then investigate the circuit, neuromodulatory, and cellular/synaptic mechanisms of behaviorally relevant memory formation.
Qihong Lu, PhD, (he/him)
PhD Institution: Princeton University
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Stefano Fusi and Dr. Daphna Shohamy
Biography: Qihong is interested in computational models of episodic memory. He is currently an Alan Kanzer Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, working with Daphna Shohamy and Stefano Fusi. He is affiliated with the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and The Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Princeton University, where he worked with Ken Norman and Uri Hasson. He earned his B.S. in Mathematics and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, working with Tim Rogers. He is originally from Shanghai, China.
Summary of Research: Qihong is interested in what he calls the “optimal episodic memory (EM) policy”—when to encode and retrieve EM and how to coordinate EM with other memory systems. This is underexplored in classic experimental works, as most of them have a dedicated encoding/study phase and retrieval/recall phase, making the optimal EM policy relatively clear. However, in reality, the brain has to decide when to encode and retrieve, which is often computationally challenging. In the past, he worked on computational models of optimal EM policy in the service of sequential prediction, event segmentation, and task-dependent behavior. At ZI, he has been working on computational models of EM contribution to decision-making, experiments on how humans acquire and adjust their EM policy, and EM contribution to the acquisition of structured task representations. Going forward, he also wants to understand conditions known to impact episodic memory, such as brain fog, autism, Alzheimer's, aging, etc., in terms of EM policy and cognitive techniques for memory improvement.
Yuta Mabuchi, PhD, (he/him)
PhD Institution: Cornell University
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Andres Bendesky
Biography: After earning his BS in Biological Sciences from Hokkaido University, Japan, in 2017, Yuta went on to earn a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University. During his Ph.D. in Nilay Yapici’s lab, Yuta studied visually-guided male courtship behavior in the fly, Drosophila melanogaster using genetic manipulations, two-photon calcium imaging, and machine-learning based behavioral quantifications. As a postdoctoral fellow in Andrés Bendesky's lab at the Zuckerman Institute, Yuta is interested in studying the genetic and neuronal basis of behavioral evolution in Peromyscus species.
Summary of Research: For his postdoctoral work, he is studying how genetic variation modifies neural circuits to alter behavior, with a particular focus on parental behavior. Parental care is critical to child survival and healthy human development, yet little is known about how the brain controls parental care and about variation in parental behavior between individuals and species. He uses two species of evolutionarily unique Peromyscus mice, the oldfield mouse (P. polionotus) and the deer mouse (P. maniculatus), which display drastically different parental strategies. The oldfield mouse is monogamous and displays biparental care, while the deer mouse is promiscuous and fathers provide little parental care. Using evolutionarily unique Peromyscus mice, he studies the mechanistic basis of parental care using genetic, genomic, molecular, circuit, and behavioral tools.
Maëla Paul, PhD, (she/her)
PhD Institution: Collège de France
Faculty Mentors: Dr. Stavros Lomvardas and Dr. Franck Polleux
Biography: Maëla Paul is a neuroscientist whose career has been driven by a deep fascination with brain development. After specializing in neuroscience at the École Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne University in Paris, she gained valuable experience through internships at Prof. Sonia Garel's lab in Paris and Prof. Franck Polleux's lab at the Zuckerman Institute, the latter resulting in a co-authored publication in Science. Maëla’s doctoral research at the Collège de France, under Dr. Fekrije Selimi, focused on the molecular mechanisms governing synapse specificity and identity. Building on Roger Sperry's chemo-affinity hypothesis from the 1960s, which suggested a unique molecular combination for each synapse type in neural circuit assembly, her groundbreaking work demonstrated an activity-dependent and afferent-specific stepwise generation of a synaptic molecular code. This code is crucial for excitatory afferent connectivity and specificity on cerebellar Purkinje cells. Her findings are currently under revision at Nature Neuroscience. Dr. Paul has published six articles and received awards for her presentations at international conferences, including the Gordon Research Seminar and The Brain Conference. Her research contributes significantly to our understanding of circuit development mechanisms and their implications for neurodevelopmental disorders.
Summary of Research: Maëla’s postdoctoral research, conducted jointly in the Lomvardas and Polleux labs, focuses on deciphering the gene regulatory networks that control where and when 'wiring genes' should be expressed in the developing brain. Her work aims to identify both conserved and human-specific networks that account for unique features of human brain development and connectivity. Building on her doctoral work on synaptic specificity, Dr. Paul's current postdoctoral research explores how these genetic networks orchestrate the precise wiring of neural circuits. She is particularly interested in understanding how these mechanisms may have been modified during human evolution to give rise to our species' distinct cognitive capabilities. By combining cutting-edge genomic techniques with functional analyses, Maëla seeks to uncover fundamental principles of brain development and evolution, with potential implications for understanding neurodevelopmental disorders.
Sandra Romero Pinto, PhD, (she/her)
PhD Institution: Harvard University
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Dmitriy Aronov
Biography:
Sandra Romero Pinto was born and raised in Lima, Peru, where her family still lives. She left the country at age 19 to pursue her undergraduate degree in Monterrey, Mexico, where she studied Biomedical Engineering and spent her final year at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. During her time in Italy, she became excited about the field of neuro-engineering, which led her to pursue a Master’s degree at EPFL in Switzerland. There, she further specialized in engineering applications to the brain, focusing her research on the development of neural prostheses for the visual system.
Her work at EPFL deepened her interest in neuroscience, and she completed her PhD at Harvard, studying the dopaminergic system in the brain, with a focus on reinforcement learning under the supervision of Nao Uchida. She recently moved to NYC and is excited to begin this new chapter in her career.
Summary of Research:
During her PhD, Sandra Romero Pinto’s research focused on bridging computational models with the biological implementation of the brain, working at the intersection of theoretical and experimental neuroscience. At Columbia, she plans to continue working in this interdisciplinary domain, studying animals performing ethologically relevant tasks and specialized behaviors. She will investigate episodic and semantic memories in food-caching birds with Dmitriy Aronov and is also interested in pursuing extensive collaborations with the Columbia Theory Center.
The Aronov lab has conducted ground-breaking research in food-caching birds, discovering a potential neural code for episodic memory, instantiated as a sparse activation of a random set of neurons referred to as 'barcodes.' One of the key questions Sandra is eager to address in her postdoctoral work is how this transient code for episodic memory relates to the more stable place cell code in the hippocampus. Understanding this link would be exciting, as it could unite different perspectives on the role of the hippocampus in memory.
Chuyi Su, PhD, (she/her)
PhD Institution: University of Connecticut
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Yasmine El-Shamayleh
Biography: Chuyi Su is a systems neuroscientist with expertise in studying the functional role of thalamocortical circuits in visual information processing. Her PhD research focused on delineating the contribution of specific cortical cell types and layers in early visual processing. Her postdoctoral research builds on this foundation by continuing to study the cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying high-level visual processing in the cerebral cortex.
Summary of Research: The goal of Chuyi's current postdoctoral research is to uncover the cellular and circuit mechanisms of visual shape processing. In the El-Shamayleh lab, Chuyi is leveraging a combination of electrophysiological, behavioral, and optogenetic approaches to investigate how neurons in higher visual cortical area V4 contribute to the representation and perception of visual objects.
Jessica Zung, PhD, (she/her)
PhD Institution: Princeton University
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Gwyneth Card
Biography: Jessica is a postdoctoral research associate in the Card Lab at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. She caught the research bug as an undergraduate studying bumble bee behavior and distribution in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and has been fascinated by insect behavior ever since. During her PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, she studied the evolution of human-specialist mosquitoes, focusing on the chemistry of human and animal odors. As a postdoc, Jessica has switched her research focus from mosquito olfaction to fly vision. She is exploring how visual information is processed by special feature-detecting neurons and their downstream partners. Throughout her scientific career, Jessica has been especially drawn to studying both the 'how' and the 'why' of natural animal behaviors, striving to understand their mechanistic basis as well as their ecological and evolutionary context. When not in the lab, she enjoys spending her time biking, cooking, and woodworking.
Summary of Research: A critical part of visual processing is interpreting patterns of light and dark falling on the retina as meaningful objects that an animal can respond to appropriately: e.g., to flee from a looming shadow cast by an approaching predator or to follow a moving object that represents a prospective mate. A single stimulus may include multiple visual features that enable an animal to identify an object and respond appropriately. In the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster, many of these features are encoded by a few dozen distinct classes of visual projection neurons called LC (lobula columnar) neurons. Jessica is taking advantage of the abundance of genetic tools and connectomic data available in Drosophila to probe how information from multiple LC cell types is combined to drive ethologically relevant behaviors.
Gift to support world-class postdoctoral scientists pursuing bold approaches to the study of mind, brain and behavior