I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Walsh Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The goal of my research is to understand how the complex circuitry of our brain is built during development. This process involves the generation, assembly, and functional maturation of billions of neurons and takes several years of our life. I hope our efforts into basic research on brain development will help us to fundamentally understand the mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders.

I am interested in mechanisms of development and maturation of the cerebral cortex, a brain region involved in functions such as sensory processing and language. In particular, my main focus is to understand how excitatory and inhibitory neurons (pyramidal cells and interneurons, respectively) establish their specific patterns of synaptic connectivity during brain development. The disruption of a normal balance between synaptic excitation and inhibition has been associated with autism and schizophrenia.

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