Leila Pascual

Leila May Pascual is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at Emory University, where she is a Woodruff Fellow and HHMI Gilliam Fellow. She studies songbirds in the Sober Lab to understand how the brain enables the development of motor skills (a happy coincidence being a singer and songwriter herself). Leila received a B.S. in neuroscience and biology from Brandeis University, where she caught the ‘science bug,’ and received an undergraduate teaching assistant award. Her fascination with the brain and behavior has led to her doing wide-ranging research at the University of Michigan, MIT, Brandeis and Emory. These include differentiating abnormal muscle innervation patterns in patients with neuropathy, linking prenatal maternal immune function to autism, studying how taste and place memory interacts in the brain, and studying how auditory processing improves maternal behavior.

Principal Investigator: Samuel Sober

Co-Mentor: Kofi Vordzorgbe

Fellow: Tommy Mesamours

Project
When you’re getting ready in the morning, you’ve probably never wondered how you’re able to button your clothes while chatting with your roommate at the same time. Why? Because your nervous system is so well-practiced in carrying out these tasks that you perform them simultaneously without thought and even simultaneously. But in fact, both of these motor tasks — the fine, ordered coordination of your fingers and the precise vibrations of your vocal muscles — are incredible feats made possible by your brain. However, it remains unknown how the brain controls muscle activity to produce skilled behavior. The Sober lab investigates how neurons and circuits change during the process of learning skilled motor behavior by studying vocal learning in songbirds. The goal of the project is to understand how precise patterns of activity in the regions of the songbird brain that control song behavior are reshaped when a bird learns to sing. To do so, the lab combines advanced electrophysiological methods with novel mathematical tools to examine how the relationship between neural activity and song vocal behavior changes during learning. The fellow will work closely with the co-mentors to gain skills in experimental and computational techniques used in neuroscience research, as well as exposure to a vibrant and collaborative research environment.