Affiliation: University of California, Irvine. Department of Developmental and Cell Biology

Dr. Katherine Thompson-Peer earned her BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. For her gap years, she worked in the lab of Alex Kolodkin in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine from 2003-2005, studying axon guidance in Drosophila and cultured cells.  As a graduate student at Harvard Medical School, she worked with Josh Kaplan at Massachusetts General Hospital to investigate the transcriptional regulation of neuronal development in C. elegans, earning her Ph.D. in 2012. As a postdoctoral fellow with Yuh-Nung and Lily Jan at the University of California, San Francisco, in the department of Physiology and Biophysics, and HHMI, she began to study how neurons in the Drosophila peripheral nervous system respond to dendrite injury. Since April 2019, she has run her own independent group at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology. Using her background as a cellular and developmental neurobiologist with expertise in optical and genetic approaches, her lab investigates the unique features of how neurons respond to and regenerate after dendrite injury. At UCI, she is a fellow of the Reeve-Irvine Research Center, the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, and the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center.