Assistant Professor
Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind
University of California, San Diego and The Salk Institute
Brenda Bloodgood is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Biological Sciences, Neurobiology Section at the UC San Diego and a Kavli Faculty Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. Research in the Bloodgood lab aims to understand how the function of neural circuits changes in response to an animal’s interaction with its environment. She is approaching this question by investigating how activity-dependent gene expression regulates the connectivity between excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the hippocampal microcircuit with the goal of understanding how these processes relate to animal behavior and disease. Dr. Bloodgood earned her B.Sc. in Animal Physiology and Neuroscience from UC San Diego in 2001 and her Ph.D. from the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in 2006. She continued at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow before establishing her own lab in 2012. She is a Searle and Pew Biomedical Scholar, the recipient of a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.