Dr. Ali Hanson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University. She received her undergraduate degree from Colgate University where she played Division I varsity women’s basketball and earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Molecular Biology. Inspired by her undergraduate research experiences, Ali obtained her MD/PhD as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She carried out her thesis work in the laboratory of Dr. Ethan Lee in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology where she studied the molecular mechanisms of Wnt signal transduction. While completing her medical training, Ali became fascinated by the mind and how it might relate to the brain. This led her to pursue residency training in Psychiatry where she joined the research track as a Leon Levy Fellow in Neuroscience at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute. As a resident and T32 Research Fellow at Columbia, Ali joined the laboratory of Dr. Rafael Yuste, where she focused on one of the simplest known nervous systems; the nerve net of the cnidarian Hydra vulgaris. Currently, Ali is developing tools to further establish Hydra as a model system with the goal of studying spontaneous ultraslow frequency neural oscillations and their potential role as organizers of global neural activity and behavior.