Hannah R. Monday is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). She received a bachelor of science degree in neuroscience and behavior from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a doctorate in biomedical science from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she trained with Pablo Castillo.

During her doctoral studies, Monday discovered the essential role of local protein synthesis in presynaptic terminals for long-term synaptic plasticity, challenging longstanding assumptions about axonal function. Now in Dan Feldman’s lab at UC Berkeley, she focuses on identifying cellular- and circuit-level mechanisms underlying sensory dysfunction in autism. She has demonstrated a common loss of homeostatic plasticity in parvalbumin interneurons in sensory cortex across multiple mouse models of autism. Her ongoing research will study how disrupted homeostatic plasticity may contribute to sensory overload in autism. By combining in vivo and in vitro physiological and molecular approaches, she aims to uncover the molecular and circuit mechanisms that govern resilience or vulnerability to sensory stress, with the goal of identifying therapeutic targets for sensory circuit dysfunction. Monday has received F31 and F32 fellowships from NIH and the Marmur Award for outstanding graduate research.