Jesse Goldberg, associate professor and Robert R. Capranica Fellow in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, has been selected by the Pew Charitable Trusts to be a member of the 2023 class of Innovation Fund investigators.
Goldberg studies the ways learning processes are implemented in the brain. He will team up with New York University’s Robert C. Froemke to undertake joint research into how parents feed their young, in birds and mammals. The pair of researchers is one of six in this year’s class of investigators.
“We believe by joining forces and using a comparative cross-species approach, as well as combining studies of natural behavior with physics- and machine learning-inspired methods for carefully controlled experiments, we can achieve a breakthrough in understanding the neural mechanisms by which parental animals are able to balance their own needs with the needs of their offspring,” the researchers wrote.
The study brings together two labs focused on opposite ends of the nervous system and in different species. The Goldberg lab studies motor control, including tongue kinematics in mice and singing and courtship behavior in birds. In contrast, the Froemke lab studies hearing in rodents.
In this study, the labs will work together to test if seemingly distinct parental behaviors in birds and mammals are governed by common neural signals.
