Bio:

Maria Antonietta Tosches is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, Department of Biological Sciences. She is interested in understanding the principles driving the evolution of neuronal cell types and neural circuits. She studied biology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and in 2012 earned a Ph.D. from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in the lab of Detlev Arendt. There, studying a marine worm, she discovered the ancient role of melatonin signaling as a modulator of the neural circuits that control circadian behavioral states. As a postdoc with Gilles Laurent at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, she used single-cell transcriptomics in turtles and lizards to infer the evolutionary history of cortical glutamatergic and GABAergic neurons.