Dr. Y Kate Hong

Throughout her career, Kate Hong has followed her curiosity to make amazing discoveries about how sensory information guides behavior in the brain. After finishing her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at Brown University, Kate worked as a research technician in labs in immunology and cancer biology. However, it wasn’t until she was working in a neuroscience lab at the Max Planck Institute in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship that she fell in love with research. Subsequently, she applied for graduate school and began her PhD studying retinal ganglion cells at Harvard, where she discovered some of the mechanisms behind the remarkable ability of axons to “wire” themselves to their targets. Exploring this further, Kate completed two postdocs, one at Boston Children’s Hospital and a second at Columbia University, where she was intrigued by the surprising flexibility and plasticity of how sensory systems are wired in mice. Now, at her position as an Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Kate is pursuing exciting questions about the distributed nature of sensory information in the brain. It seems that Kate’s curiosity about the mysteries of neuroscience will lead her to more thrilling discoveries and, importantly, even more questions.