Affiliation: Princeton University

Alyssa Wilson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, in the lab of Sebastian Seung. Her work is focused on describing how neurons rewire during normal postnatal development and during memory consolidation in adulthood, using functional and structural correlates of synaptic plasticity. Functional information is measured through in vivo imaging of fluorescent markers of calcium transients in neurons. To gather structural information about synaptic connectivity, she has helped to develop a state-of-the-art technique known as high-throughput electron microscopy, in which a very high resolution (nanometers per pixel) 3D image volume of brain tissue is generated and membranes are stained. In this technique, every cell, its organelles, and synapses between neurons can be directly visualized. From these images, she applies machine learning to identify cells and their connections, and measures the patterns in synaptic connectivity between neurons. Alyssa earned a PhD in physics from Harvard University (2017), where she did her dissertation research in electron-microscopy-based analysis of neural circuits (published in Cell Reports, 2019). She received an MPhil in Atomic, Mesoscopic and Optical Physics from the University of Cambridge in 2010 as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. In 2009, Alyssa earned a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Physics, with a minor in Mathematics, from Drexel University.