I am a neuroscientist and HHMI Hanna Gray Fellow at Columbia University. I hold a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard University, and a B.A. and M.Phil. in genetics from the University of Cambridge.

As a Ph.D. student, I dissected molecular pathways underlying zebrafish embryogenesis in Alex Schier’s lab and co-created the CRISPR/Cas9 web tool, CHOPCHOP. In the final year of my Ph.D., I attended the 2017 Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where I became fascinated by cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopuses and squid). This inspired me to return to Woods Hole as a Grass Fellow in 2018, and to launch a novel research program on cuttlefish camouflage in my postdoc.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Richard Axel, I am trying to understand the neural basis of cuttlefish camouflage behavior. Specifically, I want to uncover how the physical properties of the visual world are represented by patterns of neural activity in the cuttlefish’s brain, and how this representation is transformed into an approximation of the physical world on the skin.