DIALOGUES OF DISCOVERY

On May 26, 2010, Janelia Farm Research Fellow Roian Egnor delivered a lecture titled “Whistling in the Dark: What Can Mouse Vocalizations Tell Us About the Brain?”

Egnor's presentation offered an introduction to her research into the neural basis of natural animal behaviors, a field called neuroethology. At Janelia Farm, Egnor is studying mouse vocal and social behavior as a route towards understanding information processing in the nervous system.

Egnor received a degree in biology with a focus on integrative neuroscience at Bryn Mawr College, where a professor introduced her to the work of Masakazu “Mark” Konishi, a pioneering neuroethologist at the California Institute of Technology

Two years after graduating from Bryn Mawr—a period that encompassed working in Parisian AIDS clinics, training dolphins to recognize specific frequencies of sound, and tracking monk seals in the remote northwestern Hawaiian Islands—Egnor joined Konishi's lab, where she became fascinated by neuroethology while contributing to the ongoing study of barn owl hearing.