News

April 2024

Congratulations to Addie Minerva for receiving a Princeton Honorific Fellowship from the graduate school.

Congratulations to Yousuf El-Jayyousi for being awarded an NSF GRFP fellowship!

Nov 2023

Congratulations to Chris Zimmerman for receiving a K99 from the Brain Initiative!

Rachel successfully defends her thesis! Congratulations Dr. Lee!

Anna successfully defends her thesis! Congratulations Dr. Zhukovskaya!

Oct 2023

Ilana receives the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award.

Sept 2023

Welcome to the new PNI graduate students who join the lab: Will Long, Vanessa Roser, and Yunchang Zhang! Will will be co-advised by Tatiana Engel, Vanessa by Tim Buschman, and Yunchang by Nathaniel Daw.

Congratulations to Dr. Stone for successfully defending her PhD!

Aug 2023

Welcome to Yousuf  El-Jayyousi, who joins our lab for his PhD. He will be co-advised by Jonathan Pillow.

Apr 2023

Congratulations to Tim for receiving the Shapiro award for his thesis proposal!

Congratulations to Michael for receiving an NRSA award!

Congratulations to Juan, Brenna, and Emma for acceptance to excellent PhD programs!

Mar 2023

Congratulations to Lindsey for receiving an NRSA award!

Jan 2023

Welcome to Bichan Wu, who joins our lab and the Pillow lab as a PNI graduate student.

The lab receives a PNI Innovator Award (with Nathaniel Daw).

Dec 2022

Welcome to Rob Fetcho, who joins our lab as a CV Starr fellow, after completing his PhD (and a short postdoc) in Conor Liston’s lab at Weill Cornell.

Sept 2022

Congratulation to Lindsey for receiving a Trainee Professional Development Award for SFN 2022.

Congratulations to Dr. Lindsay Willmore for a very successful thesis defense! We’ll miss you!

Aug 2022

Thanks to Scott for inviting us to his farm for a lab BBQ! and thanks to Ryan & Rachel for organizing!

July 2022

Congratulations to Lindsay for her Nature paper acceptance! Fun to share bubbly and pie w/ the Falkner lab!

June 2022

Congratulations to Lindsey for receiving a postdoctoral fellowship from the Sloan Swartz Foundation!

Congratulations to Chris for receiving a Doupe Fellowship to attend the McKnight meeting.

May 2022

Congratulations to Iris for receiving an NRSA fellowship!

Congratulations to Dr. Weston Fleming for successfully defending his thesis!!

Dec 2021

Congratulations to Addie for passing quals!!

Sept 2021

Lab outing to a ropes course! So fun!

July 2021

Welcome to Lindsey Brown, who joins our lab & Mark Goldman’s after completing her PhD at Harvard in Applied Math.

May 2021

Ilana is promoted to full professor. She got to celebrate with current & former lab members.

March 2021

Congratulations to Addie on receiving an NSF graduate research fellowship!

December 2020

Goodbye to Julia, who starts a faculty position at Northwestern next month.

Congratulations to Alex for receiving a Sir Henry Welcome Postdoctoral fellowship.

Congratulations to Yotam and to Iris for passing their qualifying exams!

November 2020

Welcome to Michael Siniscalchi, who joins our lab after completing his PhD at Yale in Alex Kwan‘s lab.

September 2020

Welcome to Addie Minerva, who joins our lab and Cate Pena‘s lab for her PhD.

Congratulations to Victoria Corbit for receiving an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship.

Congratulations to Ben Engelhard for accepting a faculty position at Technion!

June 2020

Congratulations to Lili Cai on a successful thesis defense!

Goodbye to Lili, Clare and Laura! We’ll miss you!

Feb 2020

Congratulations to Ben Engelhard for being awarded a K99 Path to Independence Award!

Jan 2020

Goodbye to Nathan Parker, who starts his postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller next month. Congratulations on a wonderful thesis — We’re going to miss you!

Dec 2019

Congratulations to Chris Zimmerman, who receives a prestigious HHWF postdoctoral fellowship!

Bittersweet to say goodbye to Malu, who leaves to start her lab at Emory in a few weeks!

Nov 2019

Welcome to Ryan Cho, a new postdoc to join the lab as a CV Starr Fellow. Ryan recently completed his PhD with Viviana Gradinaru at Caltech.

Oct 2019

Congratulations to PhD candidates Lindsay Willmore and Rachel Lee for passing their qualifying exams!

Welcome to Chris Zimmerman and Victoria Corbit, new postdocs to join the lab. Chris recently completed his PhD with Zack Knight at UCSF. Victoria recently completed her PhD with Susanne Ahmari and Aryn Gittis at U Pittsburgh.

July 2019

Welcome to Iris Stone (jointly advised by Jonathan Pillow) and Yotam Sagiv (jointly advised by Nathaniel Daw), PNI graduate students to join the lab.

May 2019

Congratulations to Clare for successfully defending her thesis!

Toast for Courtney’s Neuron paper and Rachel’s eLife paper!

Goodbye celebration for Heejae Jang, who will be going to neuro grad school at NYU.

April 2019

Congratulations to Lindsay Willmore and Rachel Lee on receiving NSF GRFP fellowships!

March 2019

Congratulations to Malu on receiving multiple tenure-track faculty position offers! We’re looking forward to her decision and watching her future successes unfold.

The Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain writes an article about recent progress from our lab and other labs on understanding dopamine neuron heterogeneity.

The Brain Initiative makes a video about Ilana & Daniela‘s collaboration to develop and apply new statistical approaches to study neural coding in the reward circuit.

Jan 2019

Congratulations to Scott Bolkan on being awarded an NRSA postdoctoral fellowship!

Nov 2018

Welcome to Alex Pan Vazquez, who joined our lab and the IBL for his postdoctoral work. He did his PhD in Juan Burrone‘s lab at Kings College London.

Sept 2018

Welcome to Lindsay Willmore, who joined our lab and the Falkner lab for her graduate work.

Ilana and her sister Daniela receive an NIH CRCNS R01 to develop and apply statistical methods to study neural coding in the reward circuit.

May 2018

Ilana is promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

Congratulations to Dr. Joel Finkelstein on his successful thesis defense!

Mar 2018

A profile about Ilana on Princeton’s homepage.

Dec 2017

A Research Highlight in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on our recent Cell paper – congrats Malu and team!

Nov 2017

Beautiful talks by Ben, Julia and Nathan at SFN nanosymposia.

Oct 2017

Ilana is named a 2017 NYSCF-Robertson Neuroscience Investigator.

The lab receives a collaborative U19 from the BRAIN Initiative, with 6 other labs at Princeton and UCDavis, to study neural circuit dynamics of working memory and decision-making. More info here.

July 2017

Ilana receives the 2017 Daniel X. Freedman Prize for outstanding basic research from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

PNI graduate students Ellia and Anna join the lab. Welcome!

The lab joins the International Brain Laboratory and the Simons Collaboration for the Global Brain.

May 2017

Congrats to our graduating seniors – Hee Jae, Jennifer, Duc, Alex – for successfully defending their theses in Physics, MolBio, Psychogy, and Neuroscience!

Congrats to Dr. Hessam Akhlaghpour for a successful PhD thesis defense! Good luck at Rockefeller!

Congrats to Jessica for receiving a Shapiro Award to support her senior thesis research in the lab.

Apr 2017

Congrats to Lili for being awarded a travel fellowship for RLDM2017.

Congratulations to Julia on receiving an NRSA fellowship from NIMH!!

Mar 2017

Congrats to Weston for being awarded a 2017 NSF GRFP Fellowship!

Congrats to Malu for being awarded a 2017 Allison J. Doupe Fellowship!

Welcome to Scott Bolkan, a new postdoc in the lab! Scott recently completed his PhD at Columbia with Christoph Kellendonk and Josh Gordon.

Feb 2017

Great talk by Nathan at Cosyne on prefrontal-accumbens interactions!

Congratulations to Courtney on receiving an NRSA fellowship from NIDA!!

Oct 2016

Congrats to Lili on passing her qualifying exam!

Sept 2016

Hessam’s paper is published in eLife! The paper is about dissociated stimulus encoding and firing rate sequences in the dorsomedial striatum during spatial working memory.  Congrats to Hessam,  Clare, Joost, Jennifer, Josh! To celebrate, we went to the Amazing Escape room in Princeton (from which we successfully escaped):

August 2016

Weston joins the lab for his PhD. Welcome!

Nathan’s Nature Neuroscience paper on projection-specific dopamine encoding receives a glowing review in F1000.

June 2016

Junuk and Joel’s paper on the role of cholinergic interneurons in cocaine-context extinction is published in Neuron–congrats, Joel, Junuk and Clare!

May 2016

Goodbye celebration after lab meeting for Michelle and Josh … We’ll miss you — good luck in grad school next year!

Michelle turns in her senior thesis and gives an impressive presentation to her committee. Terrific job in the lab!

April 2016

Paper on dopamine terminal recordings is published in Nature Neuroscience–congrats Nathan, Josh, Courtney, Junuk and Clare!

March 2016 

Malu receives a prestigious Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain postdoctoral fellowship– Congratulations!!!

February 2016 

Priyanka Singh joins the lab as an undergraduate student–welcome, Priyanka!

November 2015

Julia Cox, who did her PhD in Yang Dan’s lab at UC Berkeley, joins the lab as a postdoc–welcome, Julia!

October 2015

Junuk, Hessam, Nathan, and Joel present cool posters at SFN! Photo of Hessam presenting his poster on neural recordings in striatum during a spatial working memory task:

August 2015

Lili Cai joins the lab as a neuroscience graduate student–welcome, Lili!