Dr. Kara Marshall

Kara Marshall’s research interests and trajectory in neuroscience have made her a bit of an outsider. After all, she studies the peripheral nervous system. Kara did her PhD research in Dr. Ellen Lumpkin’s lab studying touch perception. However, partway through her thesis, the Lumpkin Lab moved from Baylor College of Medicine to Columbia University, where she had to redo her qualifying exams and start on a completely new project. Undeterred, she defended her dissertation and continued to study the periphery, this time as a postdoc in the Nobel Prize-winning lab of Dr. Ardem Patapoutian at Scripps Research Institute. In the Patapoutian Lab, she investigated the role of the PIEZO2 mechanoreceptor in bladder stretch sensation. Now back at Baylor, Kara just started her lab to study internal perception in the periphery in health and disease and how it affects the brain and behavior.