Associate Professor
About
I can write down a recipe on an index card using far less information than it takes to completely describe a finished dish. In addition to its compactness, the recipe also provides a more accurate picture of definitive characteristics of the dish than would a description of an instance of the cooked product. After all, every run of the cooking process produces a result that is a little bit different.
My lab seeks to understand how neural circuits are organized in the brain to allow animals to make varied interpretations of the external world. Just as a recipe can be thought of as an algorithm for cooking a dish, DNA contains algorithms for constructing neurons and circuits during development. We think the best way to understand universal principles of brain organization and function is to study the algorithms that development uses to construct neurons and connect them into circuits.
An important aspect of our research is to understand how instructions for unfolding something so complex can "fit" into the coding space of the genome. What are the definitive neuronal and circuit parameters that must be encoded in genomic information? How are they translated from DNA into cellular architectures during development?
We focus on chemosensory circuits, as we know that there are different kinds of neural circuits that use chemosensory information to different ends–for instinctual behaviors versus for learning. Our experimental work is conducted in fruit flies due to the graspable characteristics of their brain organization and development. We hypothesize that the algorithms used to generate learning versus instinctual circuits during development are very different from one another, and require very different amounts of genomic information.
Prof Clowney joined MCDB in 2017 after completing PhD training at UCSF and postdoctoral training at Rockefeller. During her PhD, she worked with Stavros Lomvardas on olfactory receptor choice; as a postdoc, she worked with Vanessa Ruta on the chemosensory circuits that regulate mating. She received her BS from Michigan, majoring in CMB, and did research with Cunming Duan. She teaches Bio 172 and an upper-level seminar focused on cellular diversity and scientific writing.
The Clowney Lab is accessible through the MCDB, CMB, NGP, and BIOINF PhD programs.
