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Mala Murthy is the Director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Karol Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor in Neuroscience. Her research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying social communication in Drosophila, particularly how males use their wings to produce patterned sounds during courtship to attract females. She investigates how female flies recognize these songs and choose mates based on species-specific parameters. Murthy's work utilizes quantitative behavioral assays, genetic neural circuit perturbations, and in vivo neural recordings to uncover the cellular mechanisms behind time-varying sensory information integration in song production. Additionally, her research looks into neural tuning of species-specific acoustic signals, a conserved trait across auditory systems, relating to behavioral decisions in response to sounds. She employs computational modeling to reveal how neural codes correspond to behavioral preferences for songs.
GRE scores are not accepted. Ph.D. is the primary degree; students are not required to hold an M.S.E. prior to admission.