Draft:Alison Barth

Alison Barth is an American neuroscientist and the Maxwell H. and Gloria C. Connan Professor of Life Sciences, Biological Sciences and Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early life and education
Alison Barth was born in the state of Maryland, but her family later moved to the states of Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ohio throughout her childhood. She attended Brown University for her undergraduate education, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Biology (1991). She then moved to the West Coast of the United States where she received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley (1997), and conducted her post-doctoral research in neurophysiology at Stanford University (2001).

Research and Career
During her time at Stanford University, Barth developed and filed a provisional patent for the “fosGFP” mouse, a transgenic mouse that labels green fluorescent protein (GFP) expression in vivo and visualizes neurons undergoing plasticity.

Barth moved to Carnegie Mellon University in 2002, where she began her career as a professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. Currently, Barth's research focuses on understanding how the brain changes in response to experience, particularly in the context of learning and memory utilizing mice. She studies the somatosensory cortex of rodents, investigating how synapses are altered as animals undergo different types of experiences.

Honors and Awards
In 2012, she received the McKnight Foundation’s Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award. In 2014, she received the Kaufman Grant to study neural communication in the cerebral cortex.

She was awarded the Society for Neuroscience’s Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience and the Career Development Award in 2008, and she received the Humboldt Foundation’s Bessel Research Award in 2009.