Talia Lerner, PhD
Talia Lerner is an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. In her lab, she explores the brain circuitry underlying motivation and reinforcement learning, with a particular interest in how dopamine subcircuits coordinate to control learning trajectories and transitions between different strategies of reward-seeking. Dr. Lerner earned her BS in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry from Yale University. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience from UCSF under Dr. Anatol Kreitzer where she focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms of striatal synaptic plasticity, specifically on elucidating the roles of neuromodulators like dopamine in controlling the direction of plasticity. Dr. Lerner completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University under Dr. Karl Deisseroth, where she concentrated on the postsynaptic actions of dopamine to examine how dopamine release is regulated differentially in specific midbrain subcircuits.
Agnete Kirkeby, PhD
Agnete Kirkeby, PhD, is an associate professor and group leader at the Department of Neuroscience at University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and at the Wallenberg Center for Regenerative Medicine at Lund University (Sweden). Agnete and her group has unique expertise in using human pluripotent stem cells for production of subtype-specific neural cells, and has developed protocols for accurate patterning of neural cells toward different regional fates as well as complex in vitro models of the early human brain development. This work has further led to the development of a promising dopamine neuron cell replacement therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD), which is expected to enter clinical trials in 2021. In this project, the Kirkeby group will be applying complex stem cell models to study the causes of the underlying brain inflammation in PD.
