Bio:

Fenna Krienen is a postdoctoral fellow in Steve McCarroll’s lab in the department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from University of California, Berkeley, and did her doctoral work at Harvard University with Randy Buckner using noninvasive neuroimaging in large human cohorts to infer functional connectivity in the cerebral cortex and cerebellum. She was a Brain-Mind Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at The George Washington University with Chet Sherwood, where she developed an analytic approach for jointly analyzing human neuroimaging and microarray data to reveal transcriptional correlates of large-scale connectivity, before joining the McCarroll lab. Fenna uses single nucleus DNA and RNA sequencing across species (focusing on primates) to understand how brain cell types have evolved, and as a way to build better links between human genetics and animal models. She is a recipient of a Simons Foundation for Autism Research (SFARI) Bridge to Independence Award.