News
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
- Share
Latest News
New grafting technique could combat disease threatening banana crops
Grafting is the technique of joining the shoot of one plant with the root of another so they continue to grow together as one. Until now it was thought impossible to graft grass-like plants in the group known as monocotyledons because they lack a specific tissue type, called the vascular cambium, in their stem. Researchers […]
Scholar aims to be LA’s next City Controller
Reid Lidow is in election mode. He is campaigning to be City Controller of his home town, Los Angeles, and he sees it as a chance to improve the lives of his fellow citizens, in keeping with the Gates Cambridge mission. He wants to reimagine the office and help it to be “a force multiplier” […]
How can teenagers build resilience?
Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer [2021] has long been fascinated by the impact of our social and cultural context on how we view the world. Understanding this is particularly important for teenagers as their brain continues to develop, and 75% of socioemotional disorders begin in adolescence. Understanding this has become a more urgent issue in the light […]
‘Humanitarian aid should take account of livestock needs’
Humanitarian support for livestock-dependent populations displaced by climate change and disasters must take livelihood needs into account to support health and aid longer-term recovery, according to a new study. The study, ‘Disaster displacement and zoonotic disease dynamics: The impact of structural and chronic drivers in Sindh, Pakistan’, is led by Dorien Braam and published in […]
Understanding depression in all its complexity
“Imagine if there were such a thing as a ‘Coughing Disorder’,” says Richard Dear. “Doctors can see that you are coughing, but have no idea if the cough is caused by Covid, tuberculosis or something stuck in your throat. These underlying causes all need different treatments, but imagine that doctors don’t even agree on the […]
Comic book tells story of inspiring female leader
A Gates Cambridge Scholar has co-created a comic book on an inspiring Indian woman farmer who developed a one-acre cropping model to combat drought, debt and distress in her region. The book, Raindrop in the Drought: Godavari Dange, by Reetika Subramanian and Maitri Dore, tells the story of Godavari Tai from Marathwada in Maharashtra state […]
Study investigates role of motion monitoring in predicting brain injury outcomes
New research on patients with severe brain injury has found that motion monitoring may be able to provide valuable diagnostic and prognostic information, leading to improved ICU care. The study, “Decoding accelerometry for classification and prediction of critically ill patients with severe brain injury”, led by Gates Cambridge Scholar Shubhayu Bhattacharyay, is published today in Nature’s […]
Scholar wins prestigious MLA award
Gates Cambridge Scholar Anna Kathryn Kendrick has won the 31st annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures from the Modern Language Association of America. Anna [2011], who did her PhD in Spanish at the University of Cambridge […]
Scholars address sustainability at internal symposium
Five Gates Cambridge Scholars will take part in an internal symposium this week, discussing research on sustainability issues ranging from legal avenues to tackle the climate crisis to educational resilience. Each scholar will outline their research at the symposium on 1st December. They are: Jillian Sprenger [2021], who is doing an MPhil in Environmental Policy, […]
‘Heritage is not just about monuments’
Heritage studies tend to be based on Western models and case studies, with a lot of emphasis on monuments and tangible artefacts. “That’s quite a Western lens,” says Stanley Onyemechalu, who has just started his PhD at Cambridge. “I argue that Archaeology in a lot of the global north is obsessed with material things, but […]
