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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
Lifetime honour for former Provost
Professor Barry Everitt, former Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, has been elected a lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals. AAAS has elected more than 500 scientists, engineers and innovators from around the world and […]
‘Tackle climate change misinformation through computational social science’
Future leaders and researchers need to be urgently trained to tackle climate change misinformation through an interdisciplinary approach that foregrounds computational social science and extends beyond laboratories and university campuses to shape the science-policy interface and rebuild public trust in climate research, according to leading academics. Writing in Nature Human Behaviour, the academics, including Dr Ramit […]
An existential psychological thriller for aesthetes
Christy Edwall’s first novel, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, out in early February, has been described as “an existential psychological thriller for aesthetes and lovers of cultural London and the world… A story cleverly told of a young woman involved in contemporary forms of global voyeurism”. It tells the story of Margit, a London […]
A detective of ancient climate change
Stijn De Schepper is an ancient detective. His job is to investigate past climate change through working his way down the ocean bed, starting with today’s sediment and moving back through thousands of years of Earth’s history. He maps ancient marine sediments to find out if, why and how the environment changed in the past. […]
The rich history inside ancient texts
The ancient Greek texts Daniel Hanigan [2019] has been studying for the last three years have been seen as a kind of ancient lonely planet guide, but he found something much more interesting which went to the heart of the ancient Greek experience and how it evolved over time. He says: “The periploi have […]
Omicron variant study could contribute to future vaccine development
All the omicron strains are different from the original COVID infection and from each other, but repeated exposure to pre-omicron variants can protect against omicron variants, according to a new study which has implications for further vaccine development. The study, BA.2 and BA.5 omicron differ immunologically from both BA.1 omicron and pre-omicron variants, is published […]
Scholar wins prestigious business book award
A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious business book publishing prize for her proposal on the pioneering work of climate change entrepreneurs. Âriel de Fauconberg was one of three finalists for the Financial Times and McKinsey’s Bracken Bower Award for her book proposal, Before the Dawn: Racing to net zero on the front lines […]
Decolonising energy policy research
Energy policy in the Global South needs to be rooted in the local context, according to a new paper, co-authored by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, which outlines ways of bridging the Global North-South research divide. The paper, Bridging the divide in energy policy research: Empirical evidence from global collaborative networks, is published this week in […]
Is climate change affecting animals’ body size?
New evidence shows that some mammals increase in size in warmer settings, upsetting established norms and suggesting that climate change may be having an unexpected impact on animal body size. The study*, published in Scientific Reports, finds that recent changes in treeshrew body size subvert two of the most studied ecogeographical rules about body size […]
How anti-black logic travelled back to Africa
When she first started doing Women’s Studies, Ola Osman [2019] spent time in Liberia researching the impact of the civil war on women. For her PhD she has taken a step back to look at the deeper roots of Liberian politics and how the repatriation of enslaved people during the ‘Back to Africa’ Movement in […]
