Andrew Leifer

Andrew Leifer is an Associate Professor of Physics and Neuroscience at Princeton University. He obtained a B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Political Science at Stanford University in 2007 and earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University in 2012 under the guidance of Professor Aravinthan Samuel. He then received a Lewis-Sigler Fellowship to form his own independent research group at Princeton University, where he subsequently joined the faculty in 2016. He is an Investigator in the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain and a recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award and the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award.

His research seeks to understand how patterns of neural activity generate animal behavior. In particular, he studies the model organism C. elegans, a microscopic worm with a simple nervous system capable of rich behaviors. Leifer and his team have pioneered optogenetic microscopy techniques to optically manipulate and monitor populations of neurons in an animal as it moves. To learn more visit here.

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