My long-term research interest has been glutamate transporters.  In graduate school, I studied glutamate transporters in postmortem tissue from patients with schizophrenia. In my postdoctoral work, I studied the role of glutamate transporters in metabolism.  At Wellesley, my lab studies glutamate transporters in the model organism C. Elegans.  We do this by studying mutant worms in which the genes for one or more transporters have been knocked-out.  We are interested in how glutamate transporters regulate behavior – particularly learning and memory – and how the transporters are involved in metabolism.  We hope that these studies will teach us something about how the process of neurotransmission has evolved.

I am excited to share my passion for neuroscience with students in the lab and in the classroom.   I teach across the curriculum including: Introduction to Neuroscience (100) and the accompanying practicum, Capstone Seminar in Neuroscience (300), Excitation, Plasticity, and Disease (305) with Laboratory, and Advanced Topics in Neuroscience: Neuropharmacology (332).  I love the interactive nature of teaching and am excited to foster discussions about complex topics in neuroscience.

Outside of neuroscience I enjoy ultimate frisbee, hiking, visual art, and board games.