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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
Exploring the emotions behind Archaeology
Archaeology is a discipline that excavates the past, piecing together scant and often disparate details to answer questions about how people lived, grew, interacted and died. For Madalyn Grant [2024], this means that Archaeology is a discipline steeped in human emotions. Yet, for a subject so infused with emotion, its practitioners tend not to confront […]
Making waste work
Luca Di Mario’s PhD in Engineering focused on sustainable business models for turning solid waste and waste water in developing countries into a useful resource, such as energy. That work has stood him in good stead for his work at the Asian Development Bank where he is currently Senior Advisor to the Vice President for […]
A changing man
The world has always been in flux, but the last decades, particularly the recent one, have been ones of rapid, often violent, transformation on many fronts. For Jaya Savige [2008] the last 11 years since leaving Cambridge have been characterised by profound change on both the personal and professional front. He has captured all of that […]
Second series of Gates Cambridge podcast coming
It’s a new academic year and Gates Cambridge is working on the second series of its So, now what? podcast taking into account feedback over the summer on our first one. The new series, which will launch in January for our 25th anniversary year, will once again be hosted by international journalist Catherine Galloway and […]
Upskilling the world in digital skills for the future
A computer science education company founded by a Gates Cambridge Scholar has gone from strength to strength, partnering with universities across the world and earning plaudits from a UK minister for its work in driving up digital skills. HyperionDev was founded by Riaz Moola as an online coding bootcamp based in South Africa. It has […]
Rob Henderson to speak at Gates Cambridge event
Gates Cambridge Scholar Rob Henderson will be speaking about his best-selling memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class at an event at Bill Gates Sr. House next Friday [4th October]. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, tells of Rob’s journey from foster care to the military to academia and explores […]
Exploring Black intellectual history
Before his PhD Siyabonga Njica [2018] was a respected spoken-word poet and he is passionate about exploring Black intellectual history through exiled South African writers and artists. He believes strongly that their stories should not remain in the archives, but should be widely understood and their impact on South African and global culture celebrated. He […]
Sugarcane: a Q & A with Emily Kassie
Gates Cambridge Scholar Emily Kassie spoke about her award-winning documentary film Sugarcane at a screening in Cambridge this week. Sugarcane won the US Documentary Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year for its investigation into systematic abuse at an Indian residential school in Canada. Emily co-directed and co-produced the film which is a searing documentary […]
Celebrating the natural world
A new seven-part natural history series will explore the wildlife of our planet’s largest continent, covering the length and breadth of Asia and highlighting dramatic, previously unseen behaviour. Presented by Sir David Attenborough, the series, which is due out shortly, will also feature the work of Gates Cambridge Scholar Alex Vail, researcher-turned-wildlife-cinematographer. Filmed over the […]
Digital twin project finalist for AI Innovation Award
An interactive and immersive digital twin project for real time monitoring of buildings was a finalist for the AI Innovation Award at the UK National AI Awards. The project used state-of-the-art virtual and augmented reality systems and followed a user-centred design process to develop multimodal interaction with an Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality system. Gates […]
