Bio:

Morgan Wirthlin is a Scientist II in the EvoGen team and Human Cell Types lab who joined the Allen Institute in 2022. She works to synthesize multi-omics datasets from a diversity of species, bringing a comparative evolutionary perspective to unlock the genomic bases of neural cell types and their resultant phenotypes. Previously, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Computational Biology Department and Neuroscience Institute. There, she helped to advance computational and experimental methods for connecting epigenomics to behavioral phenotypes, from bat vocal learning to manakin courtship dances. She received her B.A. in Biological Sciences (Evolution and Ecology) from the University of Chicago in 2009 and her Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience from Oregon Health & Science University in 2016. In her dissertation work, she sought to identify the fundamental genomic and molecular properties that characterize brain circuits for vocal learning, the basis for birdsong and human speech. Her research seeks to understand the evolution of complex motor behaviors in a diversity of species through a synthesis of comparative genomics and experimental neurobiology, as well as developing new methods for exploring neurogenomics questions in naturalistic field settings.