Timothy Burbridge, Ph.D.

Timothy Burbridge is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neuroscience Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center. He received his B.A. in biology from Williams College and his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Yale University. He is broadly interested in neural circuit development and, more specifically, in the activity-dependent factors that control mammalian axon, dendrite and synapse growth and pruning. He is particularly interested in the genetic and molecular factors that lie downstream of early neural activity patterns and which are believed to mediate neural circuit and activity modifications. His prior work was focused on deciphering the relative importance of both very early (cell migration and positioning) and somewhat later (spontaneous activity-dependent plasticity) stages of circuit development and their respective contributions to adult circuits and developmental disorders. He aims to use this knowledge of early activity-dependent circuit plasticity to investigate the genetic and molecular processes that are believed to translate early spontaneous and sensory-evoked neural activity patterns into both structural changes in interneuron subtypes as well as altered levels and patterns of inhibitory and excitatory activity in the maturing central nervous system. Burbridge’s overarching goal is to relate findings from these critical periods of development to neurodevelopmental disease and injury models, with the objectives of improved diagnosis and treatment of currently enigmatic and intractable conditions.