Benjamin D. Auerbach, Assistant Professor by Virginia Wright Benjamin D. Auerbach is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology, and he studies how experience-dependent plasticity influences perception and behavior. Auerbach comes from what he describes as “a family of scientists”. “Both my mom and my dad were academic researchers in biology, so I got...

Pengfei Song is an assistant professor and Y.T. Lo Faculty Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering who specializes in ultrasound imaging. Song first came across ultrasound while pursuing his BS in Biomedical Engineering at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. “There was this professor with some research projects focused on using MATLAB to perform image...

How would you describe your background? (I.E. Where are you from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) I grew up in Colorado, and then I went to undergrad on the east coast. I really wanted to live somewhere with deciduous trees, having grown up with a bunch of pine trees. When I started college, I had a lot of different...

How would you describe your background? (I.E. where are you from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.)  I am from a small rural town in upstate New York, which is where I learned to love nature and biology. I went to Ithaca College in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of the state, and I had my first introduction to research during my sophomore...

How would you describe your background? (I.E. where are you from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) When I started looking at colleges in my junior year of high school, I saw a major called “Neuroscience and Behavior” in a college brochure, and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever heard of – understanding the biological basis for how and...

How would you describe your background? (I.E. where you are from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) At the end of high school, I was trying to choose between psychology and chemistry. What convinced me to go to psychology was my aunt, who was a neurologist. I was having conversations with her and realized I really liked it. I started psychology as an...

How would you describe your background? (I.E. where you are from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) When I was an undergrad, I was a philosophy major and I was taking some psychology courses. I took a neuro-biology of learning and memory course, loved it, the professor then asked me to work in his lab which I decided to do. Two weeks after I started working in the...

How would you describe your background? My bachelors and masters training is in psychology. My master’s was specifically in counseling psychology and I practiced as a counselor for a couple of years. I used to be an athlete—I played tennis— and that is how I was always interested in exercise and sport. I decided why not bring exercise, sport, and psychology all together? I started looking for...

How would you describe your background? I’m an evolutionary biologist who is interested in behavior. I would say that I have always been interested in animals and animal behavior, but I didn’t really know you could study it in a scientific way until I went to college and I took my first animal behavior course as a freshman. I realized that what I was really interested in was thinking from an...

How would you describe your background? (I.E. where you are from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) I was born in Hungary, and I always wanted to be an ornithologist. I never wanted to be anything else, so when I got the chance to come to the US to study at university I continued focusing on birds and I’ve been doing that ever since. The neuroscience aspect came...