Alison is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. Long before she established her lab seeking to understand mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity, though, she dabbled in a variety of experimental questions--anything that piqued her curiosity. Even at age 7 with a keen interest in ESP, she was designing experiments to test her “mind-reading” ability on her friends. As an undergraduate, she was drawn to questions related to evolution and anthropogeny, while her graduate work was primarily conducted in an immunology lab. It wasn’t until her later graduate studies that she finally made the deep dive into the world of neuroscience. Alison’s eternal enthusiasm for tackling interesting questions of all kinds and her courage to change paths when new questions arise have undoubtedly contributed to her ability to balance many passions: professor, researcher, mentor, mom, and budding violinist(!) which she describes in her interview with Cristiana.

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