Maria Neimark Geffen, Ph.D.
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Maria is interested in the way the brain encodes information about the world around us and how our perception is shaped by our emotional state and experience. She combines computational and biological approaches to study the mechanisms behind dynamic auditory perception, memory and learning.
Maria first became interested in systems neuroscience through her undergraduate thesis under mentorship of John Hopfield at Princeton University, in which she explored the mechanics of whisking in rats. She studied texture encoding in the somatosensory system with Christopher Moore at MIT during her first two years of graduate school at Harvard. She completed her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Markus Meister at Harvard University, where she discovered a novel retinal circuit for processing moving images. After her Ph.D., she was a fellow at the Center for Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University, where she worked first in collaboration with the Laurent laboratory on temporal processing in the olfactory system, and next under mentorship of Marcelo Magnasco, exploring the dynamics of natural sounds. She has joined Penn in 2011, and built a cutting edge laboratory that studies neuronal mechanisms of auditory processing. She was awarded the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface, the Klingenstein Award in Neuroscience, the HFSP Young Investigator Award and the APAN Young Investigator Award. In her free time, she enjoys listening to natural and unnatural sounds while flaneuring across cities, parks, beaches and mountains. She may be spotted after work making funny noises with her children on local playgrounds. |
