Dr. Noelle L'Etoile

Principle Investigator

Though Noelle chose to train as a biochemist in Arnie Berk's lab at UCLA, she had always been fascinated by the human brain. Her first love was literature as she thought it was the clearest window into the functioning of the human brain. Biochemistry, however, provides the physical practical blocks upon which life and the brain are created. She hoped to use the critical, reductionist approaches provided by biochemistry, molecular genetics to study behavioral plasticity at the level of molecular interactions and in this way to understand the brain. In Cori Bargmann’s lab, she was introduced to the charismatic C. elegans.  Noelle became enchanted with the worm and started her own lab to attempt to have it all by trying to understand behavioral plasticity at the molecular, cellular and circuit levels. Then, Nando Muñoz-Lobato studying long term memory blew apart this reductionist’s understanding of the world and how to approach memory. Noelle and Nando kept hitting a wall when they ignored the dynamics of the neural circuit. Thus, they were thrilled to collaborate with the Kato and Wittmann groups to try to image the whole worm’s brain as it learns, maintains, and recalls the memory of a smell.