An opportunity for high school and college students to chat with brain science researchers at Harvard University.

Olivia Rose
Visiting Graduate Student
Lab of Carlos Ponce
Harvard Medical School

Olivia Rose is a Visiting Doctoral Student in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and Ph.D. Candidate in Neuroscience through Washington University School of Medicine.  As a member of Dr. Carlos Ponce’s lab, her research seeks to understand how the primate brain excels at recognizing faces and objects, even in crowded visual displays.  Olivia’s research focuses on the visual properties of neurons in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in integrating sensory information with goal-directed behavior.  Her work seeks to identify how prefrontal neurons represent visual information, as well as how task learning may change those representations.  Though Olivia’s research investigates this process in healthy brains, one of her biggest motivations is the translational value of her research to neurological disorders with profound sensory symptoms (such as Autism Spectrum Disorder and Schizophrenia).  Olivia unexpectedly fell in love with research while an undergraduate at Florida State University, and has been passionate about mentoring young students in STEM research ever since.

Jeff Holt
Professor of Otolaryngology & Neurology
Boston Children’s Hospital
Harvard Medical School

Jeff Holt is a Professor of Otolaryngology & Neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School where he studies auditory neuroscience.  In particular, research in Dr. Holt’s lab focuses on the genes and proteins in the inner ear, required to convert sound information into electrical signals that are transmitted to the brain.  The Holt lab is interested to understand the fundamental mechanisms of hearing and balance, and why genetic mutations lead to hearing loss and balance deficits. The long term goal of the lab to develop novel therapies to restore hearing and balance function which may benefit some of the over 30 million Americans affected by these disorders. Jeff’s interest in neuroscience began when he was an undergrad at a small liberal arts college in rural South Carolina.  Following his passion, he pursued a graduate degree in Neurophysiology at the University of Rochester and post-doctoral training at Mass General and Harvard.  He has been a member of the Harvard faculty and run a research lab at Boston Children’s since 2011.