Andrew Miri, Ph.D.

Andrew Miri received undergraduate degrees in neuroscience and mathematics from Brown University. After a stint as a high school mathematics teacher in Boston, he pursued a Ph.D. under the supervision of David Tank at Princeton University, where he was awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation. His graduate work used calcium indicator imaging and cell-attached recordings in behaving larval zebrafish to address the circuit architecture of the oculomotor neural integrator. He then worked in Tom Jessell’s laboratory at Columbia University, where he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation. His work with Jessell has increased mechanistic understanding of motor circuit function by combining contemporary approaches to measuring and perturbing neural activity with genetically mediated approaches to targeting neuronal subtypes and computational analyses of neural activity dynamics. Now an assistant professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University, Miri studies the neural mechanisms underlying movement. His recent honors include the Searle Scholar Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.