SOPHIE CARON portrait
  • Associate Professor, School Of Biological Sciences

Research Summary

Our lab wants to understand how the brain generates an internal representation of the outside world, how it stores such representations and uses them to generate meaningful behavior. Our model system is the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, in particular the mushroom body, a brain center for learning and memory. Read more about our research here: www.thecaronlab.com.

Education

  • B.Sc., Biochemistry, Universiteé de Montréal
  • Ph.D., Cellular Biology, New York University

Biography

Sophie grew up in Saint-Blaise-sur-Richelieu, a small village in Québec, Canada. She studied biochemistry at the Université de Montréal and moved to New York City to pursue her graduate studies. There, she joined the laboratory of Alex Schier, first at New York University, later, at Harvard University. During her thesis, Sophie studied the developmental mechanisms behind the diversification of sensory neurons in zebrafish. For her post-doc, Sophie returned to her beloved New York, to the laboratory of Richard Axel at Columbia University. Ever since, she has been studying how the fly brain uses and stores sensory information. As of fall 2015, Sophie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Utah