Affiliation: University of Michigan, Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Sara Aton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of Michigan. The Aton lab is focused on how waking experiences and subsequent sleep affect information storage in the brain. Work in the lab is centered on sleep-dependent processes in the adult mammalian brain - response plasticity in thalamocortical circuits following novel sensory experience, and consolidation of hippocampally-mediated long-term memory following single-trial learning. These studies employ a combination of electrophysiological, opto- and pharmacogenetic, behavioral, biochemical, and computational techniques to elucidate the role of sleep in promoting brain plasticity. Dr. Aton’s PhD thesis research, which identified intercellular and intracellular signaling pathways required for neural network dynamics within the mammalian circadian clock, was carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Erik Herzog at Washington University in St. Louis. She then carried out postdoctoral research aimed at identifying cellular and network mechanisms for sleep dependent plasticity in the developing visual system, in the laboratory of Dr. Marcos Frank at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Aton is a longstanding member of the Society For Neuroscience, the Society for Research of Biology Rhythms, and the Sleep Research Society, and has received numerous research awards, including the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience and the Grass Foundation, an Alfred B. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and an NIH New Innovator Award.