Heather is a second-year Neurobiology PhD student at the University of Chicago, where she studies learning and decision-making by using light to record and manipulate the simultaneous activity of thousands of hippocampal neurons while mice navigate through virtual reality. She is originally from San Diego California and graduated from Columbia University in 2018 with a B.A. in Neuroscience and Behavior. While at Columbia she was an Amgen Scholar and worked in two research groups studying dopaminergic systems underlying Parkinson's disease and the role of thalamocortical connectivity in attention. She has spearheaded many mentorship and outreach initiatives and spent time as both a science editor and writer. She is a huge science fiction fan, and in her free time she enjoys playing unnecessarily complicated board games with her friends. ​