The Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience (Kavli IFN) is a central organizing force for neuroscience research at UCSF and our partner institutions Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab
2019 Kavli Faculty Service Award Winner Kira Poskanzer
Kira Poskanzer started her lab at UCSF in 2015, focusing on bidirectional communication between neuron and astrocyte populations in the mammalian cortex. The lab uses electrophysiological and multiphoton imaging approaches to explore the neurotransmitter signals that astrocytes respond to, and how astrocytes can synchronize neurons into specific oscillatory rhythms.
2019 Kavli Student Service Award Winner Anna Lipkin
Anna is a fourth-year graduate student in Kevin Bender’s lab, where she studies the development of inhibitory synapses in the prefrontal cortex in adolescence. She performs electrical recordings from individual neurons to see how their responses to different inputs change over time. She hopes to be able to connect these changes in the electrical activity of single neurons to brain-wide changes in activity that commonly emerge in psychiatric disorders. Outside of lab, Anna is very involved in the Neuroscience Program, having served on the Executive, Diversity, Social, and Recruitment Committees in her time in grad school so far. She also helps produce two podcasts: Carry the One Radio, a science podcast, and the Fog at Bay, a podcast about mental illness and identity in science and medicine.