Valerie Tsai

Valerie received a B.S. in Neuroscience and a minor in English from the University of Washington, where she studied maladaptive social behavior using computational methods for behavioral quantification. Before starting her PhD, she spent two years as a post-baccalaureate research fellow at the NIMH, where she learned patch-clamp electrophysiology. Currently, as a PhD student in the Neurosciences program, she is interested in bridging and expanding on these experiences by investigating the neural and behavioral dynamics that compose social interaction and how they become disrupted in neuropsychiatric conditions like autism, with the ultimate goal of understanding the conserved neural mechanisms that may underlie the relationships formed between the self, the other, and the world.