- Speaker
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Mala Murthy, Ph.D.Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor of Neuroscience, Princeton University
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Imagine trying to navigate a new city without a map. Neuroscience has faced a similar challenge: understanding brain function without knowing its full wiring diagram. Recently, Mala Murthy’s lab at Princeton University co-led a large collaborative effort to generate the first complete map of the Drosophila brain.
In this Presidential Lecture, Murthy will describe how her group is using this connectome to explore how information flows through the brain and drives behavior. Focusing on social communication, she will discuss how flies process signals from partners, make decisions and generate flexible actions. Her lab aims to bridge the gap between brain structure and the dynamic computations that support behavior by combining large-scale neural recordings, genetic circuit tools, quantitative behavioral analysis and computational modeling.
About the Speaker
Murthy is the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 professor of neuroscience and director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. Her research group combines experimental and computational approaches to study the many neural processes that underlie animal communication, including detection and recognition of multisensory cues, decision-making, and execution and patterning of motor actions. She received her B.S. in biology from MIT and her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University, followed by postdoctoral work at Caltech as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow. Murthy has received numerous honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, an NIH New Innovator Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a McKnight Scholar Award, an HHMI Faculty Scholar Award, and a Simons Investigator Award. She also serves on the Multi-Council Working Group guiding the NIH BRAIN Initiative.