The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

John White, Ph.D., emeritus professor of anatomy and molecular biology, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Gerald Rubin, Ph.D., senior group leader, HHMI Janelia Research Campus

Mala Murthy, Ph.D., director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Karol and Marnie Marcin '96 Professor of Neuroscience, Princeton University

Sebastian Seung, Ph.D., Anthony B. Evnin Professor in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science, Princeton University

Speaker bio(s)

John White was born in Wales in 1943, grew up in London and graduated with a degree in physics from Brunel University in 1968. He joined the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1969 and graduated with a PhD from Cambridge University in 1975 under the tutelage of Sydney Brenner. He continued to work at the MRC labs until 1993 when he moved to the Department of Anatomy, University of Wisconsin. Since 2008 he has been an Emeritus Professor of Anatomy at the University of Wisconsin.

Gerald Rubin is a Senior Group Leader at The Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he served as founding director from 2003 to 2020. He obtained his BS at MIT in 1971, his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1974 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 1974-1976. He has held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, Carnegie Institution of Science, and UC Berkeley where is an emeritus professor of genetics and development. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London). He has received numerous awards, including the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, the National Academy of Sciences U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology, the Genetics Society of America Medal, and the Gruber Neuroscience Prize.

Mala Murthy (b. 1975) is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University and leads the Murthy lab in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute – their work focuses on the neural mechanisms that underlie social communication, using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model system. In July 2022, she was named Director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

Prof. Murthy grew up in southeast Texas and received her B.S. in Biology from MIT. She was a Burchards scholar in the humanities and won the John L. Asinari prize for outstanding undergraduate research in the life sciences. She then received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, working with Thomas Schwarz and Richard Scheller - her thesis research centered on mechanisms of vesicle trafficking to synaptic and other cell membranes. She did postdoctoral work in systems neuroscience with Gilles Laurent at Caltech, as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow. Her postdoctoral work initiated a new area of investigation into stereotypy in the central brain of Drosophila, in a region of the brain important for learning in memory. In 2010, she joined the faculty at Princeton University in the Departments of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016 and to Full Professor in 2019.

Her research group consists of computational neuroscientists and experimentalists, who collectively study the many neural processes that underlie social communication and behavioral flexibility, including detection and recognition of multisensory cues, decision-making, execution and patterning of motor actions, and internal brain states. She co-led the FlyWire Consortium, an open science effort, that generated the first whole brain connectome for Drosophila. Her work has led to the discovery that sensory feedback cues and brain internal states dynamically modulate song patterning in flies, which has opened up the study of how the brain mediates the back and forth exchange of information between individuals, leveraging the tools of the fly model system. Her team has also developed new methods for quantifying animal behavior that have been widely used in neuroscience research.

Prof. Murthy has received a number of honors, including an NSF CAREER award, an NIH New Innovator award, an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, a Klingenstein fellowship, a McKnight Scholar award, an NINDS Research Program award, several awards through the NIH BRAIN Initiative, an HHMI Faculty Scholar award, and a Simons Foundation Investigator award. She has participated in several events for the BRAIN Initiative at the White House and US Capitol. In 2021, she joined the Multi-Council Working Group that oversees the long-term scientific vision of the BRAIN Initiative.

Sebastian Seung is the Anthony B. Evnin Professor in the Neuroscience Institute and Computer Science Department at Princeton University. His research has been influential in both computer science and neuroscience.

Starting in the 2000s, he helped create the field of connectomics, applying deep learning and crowdsourcing to reconstruct neural circuits from electron microscopic brain images. In 2012 he launched Eyewire, which recruited over 300,000 players from 150 countries to a game to map neural connections. In 2018, he co-founded the FlyWire Consortium, which released the first connectome of the fruit fly brain in 2023.

His book Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as Top Ten Nonfiction of 2012.

Before joining the Princeton faculty, Seung studied at Harvard University, worked at Bell Laboratories, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Advisory Committee for the CIFAR Learning in Machines and Brains program, dubbed the cradle of the deep learning revolution.

Seung served as President of Samsung Research from 2020 to 2022. He is External Member of the Max Planck Society, and won the 2008 Ho-Am Prize in Engineering, and the 2026 Pradel Research Award.

Open to

Tri-Institutional