Humans of HBI

Our central nervous system has a very small capacity to regenerate. However, it has an amazing ability to rewire its circuits and adapt, whether after a traumatic injury or while we are learning a new skill. To study brain plasticity, I’m building autonomous AI systems that can help discover new patterns in complex behaviors and reveal which strategies of brain reorganization are most effective.

In the past, primary brain tumors were viewed as diseases that merely invade and destroy brain tissue. However, researchers now recognize that these tumors actually integrate into the brain’s circuitry as they grow and progress. Building on these insights, my research aims to uncover how brain tumors integrate into neural networks and influence cognitive processes such as learning and behavior.

Smoke, fresh-baked pie, rotten food, a floral cologne — at least once in your life (probably more), you’ve smelled one of these and tried to figure out where it came from. In each case, you can imagine an odor trace that travels through space and time until it reaches your nose, and your olfactory system detects it. But in natural environments, wind and other factors break up these odor traces (or “plumes,” as we call them) into signals that are sparse and highly fluctuating — nothing like the steady, delicious gradient of pie smell when you walk into a bakery. My work aims to understand how animals integrate this noisy odor information over time to figure out where an odor is coming from — and more specifically, which brain areas are involved, and how neurons in those areas weigh odor information to make these estimations.

I study how mammalian nervous systems evolved to generate complex movements like hand dexterity. I compare deer mice (the mice that are native to North America) from forests, which are good climbers and very dexterous, to those from prairies, which are not as good at climbing. I’ve found that the forest mice have a larger number of a specific type of neuron in their cortex. This is exciting because we think that evolutionary expansion of the cortex is important for humans’ skilled movement, like dexterous tool use, but we don’t really understand what having more neurons does for the brain. Our discovery about brain differences in the dexterous mice gives us a starting point for answering that question!

Mental health disorders are currently on the rise, especially among children and young people, and early life stress is an important contributor. A central question guiding my research is: Why do some individuals develop mental health conditions following early life stress, while others remain resilient? To explore this, I use mouse models to examine how stress impacts the brain across the lifespan. My goal is to identify the molecular mechanisms that drive vulnerability in some individuals and to discover ways to enhance resilience.