Destynie Medeiros, Ph.D.

Destynie Medeiros is a postdoctoral researcher in Denise Cai’s lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She holds a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she trained with Lucas Pozzo-Miller, and a B.A. in biology from the University of Hartford, where she completed her honors thesis research with Paola Sacchetti. During her doctoral research, Medeiros investigated circuit-level disruptions in a mouse model of Rett syndrome, identifying molecular, synaptic, and population-level abnormalities that alter coordinated neural activity during social behavior.

At the core of social behavior lies social memory: the ability to recognize, remember, and respond to individuals. This motivated Medeiros to understand how the brain represents social experiences and how disruptions in these processes lead to behavioral deficits. To address these questions at single-cell resolution and across extended timescales, she joined Dr. Cai’s lab, a pioneer in calcium imaging with miniscopes. Her postdoctoral research focuses on how distinct experiences are encoded, recalled, updated, and integrated across time using simultaneous in vivo miniscope calcium imaging and electrophysiology. Medeiros is particularly interested in how ensembles of hippocampal neurons coordinate to bind experiences and guide future behavior, including social interactions.