Gina Turrigiano
Professor, Brandeis University, USA. Gina Turrigiano is the Levitan Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Biology at Brandeis University.
The Turrigiano lab studies the plasticity mechanisms that allow our brains to “tune themselves up” and remain both plastic and stable. Over the last two decades her work has uncovered a family of homeostatic plasticity mechanisms, including Synaptic Scaling and Intrinsic Homeostatic Plasticity, that allow neurons to adjust their own excitability to maintain stable average firing rates and preserve information flow in the face of outside perturbations. The Turrigiano seeks to understand how homeostatic mechanisms operate within complex circuits, where they must cooperate with classical forms of synaptic plasticity such as LTP/LTD to allow experience-dependent circuit refinement and learning. Finally, we wish to understand how neurological disorders might arise from failures of self-tuning, and to determine how we might reinstate homeostatic mechanisms to improve neural circuit function.
Gina Turrigiano grew up in Northern California, and received her BA from Reed College in 1984 and her PhD from UC San Diego in 1990. She trained as a postdoc with Eve Marder at Brandeis University before joining the Brandeis faculty in 1994. She is the recipient of a MacArthur foundation “genius” award, an NIH director’s pioneer award, and the HFSP Nakasone Award, among others. She is a fellow of AAAS and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
