I have had a long-standing interest in neuroscience, beginning with my research under Nobel laureate Eric Wieschaus at Princeton University. After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton, I earned an MD/PhD from Harvard Medical School and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow in Dr. Connie Cepko's laboratory at Harvard where I discovered that Olig2 drives retinal progenitor cells towards specific cell types, published in PNAS. I then completed an ophthalmology residency at Yale followed by a retina fellowship at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary as a Heed Fellow, where I was awarded the Foundation Fighting Blindness Clinical Research Fellowship Award. Following my fellowship, I received a K08 Award from the NIH and joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School, holding a concurrent appointment at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. I was then recruited back to Yale on a Tenure-Track position and am presently an Associate Professor. My lab at Yale generated the first single-cell human retinal atlas, published in Nature Communications followed by the identification of shared glial signatures across multiple neurodegenerative conditions of the CNS, which may help lead to new therapeutic approaches, also published in Nature Communications. In a recent study published in Science Advances, I showed that SARS-CoV-2 can induce amyloid-β aggregation in the CNS, suggesting a possible link between viral infection and Alzheimer’s-related pathology, and shedding light on the neurological symptoms observed in COVID-19. I have been fortunate to receive numerous honors including the Squibb Prize for Scientific Research at Princeton, the endowed William Orthwein Yale Scholar, the Thome Memorial Foundation Award for AMD Research, an R01 NIH grant, the Spector Award in Neuroscience, the Cushing Award for Excellence and Creativity in Scientific Research, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation Young Physician Scientist Award.