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Benjamin Cocanougher
- Alumni
- United States
- 2016 PhD Zoology
- St Catharine's College
I grew up catching praying mantises and damselflies in rural Kentucky. As an undergraduate at Centre College, I majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; I spent my summers taking care of sick children at the Center for Courageous Kids and doing research in organic chemistry and neuroscience. I matriculated directly to the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and completed my first three years of medical school. I then moved to Janelia Research Campus as a HHMI Medical Research Fellow; there I studied the neural and genetic bases of behavior. As a PhD student in Zoology, I will study adaptive behavior. All animals integrate information about past experience into future decisions; this is the basis of learning and memory. I am proposing to write a specific memory and read the memory trace in the brain. I will use the fruit fly as a model organism. By understanding mechanisms of memory storage, we can begin to investigate changes in memory formation in disease; this may allow us to develop rational therapies for disorders of memory formation, including autism and Alzheimer’s disease. After completing my PhD, I will return to finish my last year of medical school and pursue a career as a child neurologist and neuroscientist, using my lab to better understand the patients I see in clinic.
Previous Education
Centre College
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Latest News
The politics of whiteness in Africa
A Gates Cambridge Scholar has co-edited the first comparative study on white privilege, power and subjectivities in post-colonial Africa in an academic journal. Danelle van Zyl-Hermann [2010] is currenty a postdoctoral research fellow […]
Speeding up the spread of information
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Preventing a genetic uprising in early life
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Scholars to speak at Internal Symposium
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A tale of the messenger’s tail
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Crime down the generations
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Scholar appointed to Latino Affairs commission
A Gates Cambridge Scholar has been appointed as a Commissioner on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs. Carlos Adolfo Gonzalez [2015], who did his MPhil at the University of Cambridge […]
Gates Scholar to speak at Black History Month event
Gates Cambridge Scholar Wale Adenbanwi will speak at an event to commemorate 30 years of Black History Month next week. Wale, the first Black African Rhodes Professor of Race Relations […]
Scholar appointed co-director of human rights centre
Gates Cambridge Scholar Ella McPherson has been appointed Co-Director of the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge. Ella is Lecturer in the Sociology of New […]
