Dr. Bieszczad is an alumnus of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Her research interests are in the neurobiological substrates of learning and memory. In particular, she studies how the brain processes and stores specific content. Animals (like humans) are capable of learning detailed information about sensory cues that are important because of their association with significant events. Associative learning makes memory rich with sensory information. What are the neural substrates of information-rich memory? The lab focuses on this question with experiments that aim to understand the transformation of transient sensory experience into long-lasting memory of those experiences in an auditory model of associative learning. The lab studies the role of learning-induced plasticity in the auditory cortex in memory, as well as the mechanisms regulating auditory cue-specific plasticity that remodels cortical representations of sound. Techniques used combine multiple levels of analysis: behavioral, electrophysiological, molecular, genetic; to describe brain-behavior relationships that can identify the key neural systems, circuits and molecules that enable specific memory over a lifetime of experiences.

Key Research Areas:

Auditory cortex, tonotopic map, sensory physiology, behavioral psychology, epigenetics, histone acetylation, representational plasticity