Mala Murthy is professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and leads the Murthy lab in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her work focuses on the neural mechanisms that underlie social communication, using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model system. In July 2022, she was named Director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
Murthy received her B.S. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University. She did postdoctoral work in systems neuroscience with Gilles Laurent at the California Institute of Technology as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow. Her postdoctoral work initiated a new area of investigation into stereotypy in the central brain of Drosophila, in a region of the brain important for learning in memory. In 2010, Murthy joined the faculty at Princeton University in the Departments of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience. She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and to professor in 2019.
Murthy’s research group consists of computational neuroscientists and experimentalists, who collectively study the many neural processes that underlie social communication and behavioral flexibility, including detection and recognition of multisensory cues, decision-making, execution and patterning of motor actions, and internal brain states. She co-leads the FlyWire Consortium, an open science effort that generated the first whole brain connectome for Drosophila. Her work has led to the discovery that sensory feedback cues and brain internal states dynamically modulate song patterning in flies, which has opened up the study of how the brain mediates the back and forth exchange of information between individuals, leveraging the tools of the fly model system. Her team has also developed new methods for quantifying animal behavior that have been widely used in neuroscience research. Murthy has received a number of awards for her work, and in 2021, she joined the Multi-Council Working Group that oversees the long-term scientific vision of the BRAIN Initiative.
