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Benjamin Cocanougher
- Alumni
- United States
- 2016 PhD Zoology
- St Catharine's College
I grew up catching praying mantises and damselflies in rural Kentucky. As an undergraduate at Centre College, I majored in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; I spent my summers taking care of sick children at the Center for Courageous Kids and doing research in organic chemistry and neuroscience. I matriculated directly to the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and completed my first three years of medical school. I then moved to Janelia Research Campus as a HHMI Medical Research Fellow; there I studied the neural and genetic bases of behavior. As a PhD student in Zoology, I will study adaptive behavior. All animals integrate information about past experience into future decisions; this is the basis of learning and memory. I am proposing to write a specific memory and read the memory trace in the brain. I will use the fruit fly as a model organism. By understanding mechanisms of memory storage, we can begin to investigate changes in memory formation in disease; this may allow us to develop rational therapies for disorders of memory formation, including autism and Alzheimer’s disease. After completing my PhD, I will return to finish my last year of medical school and pursue a career as a child neurologist and neuroscientist, using my lab to better understand the patients I see in clinic.
Previous Education
Centre College
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Latest News
$1.25m award for vaccine research
A Gates Cambridge alumna has been selected for a prestigious five-year, $1.25 million grant to investigate a meningitis vaccine in Mali. Nicole Basta is one of the first 10 recipients of the National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award. The grant will support her proposal to evaluate the duration of protection provided by the […]
Professor Rick Young speaks about his ground-breaking genetics research at a Gates Cambridge Distinguished Lecture
Named one of the top 50 leaders in science, technology and business by Scientific American, Professor Young’s lecture, Genetics, Epigenetics and Future Medicine, took place on 19th October 2011 at Magdalene College. Professor Young is a Member of the Whitehead Institute and a Professor of Biology at MIT. He studies the gene regulatory circuitry that […]
Gavin McGillivray of the UK’s Department For International Development gives Gates Cambridge Distinguished Lecture
Gavin was previously head of DFID’s Global Funds & Development Finance Institutions Department and International Financial Institutions Department. Prior to joining DFID in 2000, McGillivray managed long-term agricultural development programmes in Bolivia, Honduras, Colombia and the Caribbean. In the middle of these assignments, he spent eight years in London with an international corporate finance house, […]
Inclusive education
How do potentially marginalised students find friendship, support and a sense of belonging at university? Andrés Castro Samayoa [2011] is studying a semi-secret society that existed at the University of Cambridge in the early 20th century for his MPhil on multidisciplinary gender studies. He hopes his findings will provide information which will prove useful to […]
In their own words
Is your online password safe? Find out why passwords are likely to stay with us for decades to come even though most can be easily guess and the majority of us have forgotten about half the passwords we’ve ever registered. A Gates Scholars Council internal symposium on 2nd May will hear from Joseph Bonneau [2008] […]
Polar education
How will people adapt to climate change in the next century? The answers may be visible today in the Arctic region where indigenous people are already dealing with melting sea ice and changes to their way of life. Mia Bennett, whose interest up to now has been on how climate change is affecting the infrastructure […]
Olusegun Obasanjo to speak at new African development conference
Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, the twice-former president of Nigeria and one of Africa’s most well-known elder statesmen, is to give the opening keynote address at the first conference of a new network which aims to bring together students, entrepreneurs and business people who are passionate about business in Africa. The Cambridge Africa Business Network conference, which […]
Synthetic DNA
Researchers have created the first synthetic molecules that, alongside the natural molecules DNA and RNA, are capable of storing and replicating genetic information. Gates Cambridge alumnus Vitor Pinheiro and colleagues from Philipp Holliger’s PNAC Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge used sophisticated protein engineering techniques to adapt enzymes, that in nature […]
Future connections
A Gates alumnus is one of a number of researchers involved in the largest India-UK ICT research collaboration into the communications of the future. The nine-university consortium includes the University of Cambridge and Cambridge-based Toshiba Research Laboratories Europe. It has just been awarded £10m funding from the UK Government, involves 200 scientists in the UK and […]
