I was born in New York City and grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan. I was a city kid who nevertheless left Manhattan for rural Indiana, where I went to a small Quaker college. At Earlham I majored in Biology, with a strong interest in animal behavior. Unfortunately, I was no good at field biology. My lab advisor told me to “go West, young man, and study neurobiology”.
I began as a neurobiology graduate student at UC Berkeley, where I intended to study the mammalian visual cortex (which was just about the only area of neurobiology I had heard of). However, during my first quarter at Berkeley I was assigned a paper on axon guidance and that changed everything, leading me to David Bentley’s lab (1976-1982), where I did my doctorate. I studied axon guidance by pioneer neurons, the cells that establish the nerves and axon tracts of the nervous system. I have stayed with developmental neurobiology ever since. I next went to the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow (1982-1984), where Mick O’Shea had a lab exploring neuromodulation and synaptic plasticity. In 1984 I left Chicago for New Haven, where I joined Yale’s Biology department (now called the MCDB department).
My research looks at synaptic development and plasticity in Drosophila embryos. The methods are basically molecular genetics, combined with neural imaging and electrophysiology. I’m interested in how neurons select their synaptic partners, and I study that at both the cellular and molecular level. Currently I’m looking at the molecular signals that a postsynaptic cell sends back to the developing presynaptic neuron, signals that govern synaptic targeting, refinement, and plasticity. Many of the key genes that govern development and nervous system function in people were first discovered in flies.
Outside the lab my big love is helping my son Levon tackle high school 10th grade.