Dr. Justin O’Hare is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, where he is co-advised by Drs. Attila Losonczy and Franck Polleux. Prior to arriving at Columbia, Justin earned his PhD in Neurobiology at Duke University with Dr. Nicole Calakos where he uncovered circuit and microcircuit mechanisms underlying habit formation in rodents. As a postdoc, Dr. O’Hare shifted his focus to understanding how individual neurons learn to represent an animal’s world based on experience. As a BRAIN Initiative F32 Fellow, he uncovered a new mechanism for synaptic plasticity in vivo involving calcium release from an intracellular store known as the endoplasmic reticulum (see NIH Brain Blog post “F32 recipient reveals new mechanism for synaptic plasticity to help mice navigate new environments”). Now, with the help of the BRAIN Initiative K99/R00 award, Dr. O’Hare is preparing to launch his own independent research program focusing on how circuit- and subcellular-level organizational principles interact within individual neurons to drive learning.