Dr. Annegret Falkner
Assistant Professor Princeton University
Postdoctoral fellow New York University
PhD Columbia University
Annegret Falkner sees her lab as a thriving ecosystem, sustained by the diverse superpowers of her team. However, leading her own team of researchers was not something that she always envisioned for herself. From an early age, Annegret was encouraged by her family to pursue medical research. An independent, curious, and exuberant person, Annegret excitedly tried out many areas of research throughout her early training before finding her home in systems neuroscience. Today, as an Assistant Professor in Neuroscience at Princeton University, Annegret guides a lively team of budding scientists in pursuit of discovering how social experiences and internal states influence behavior.
Annegret found her love of neuroscience by surveying a diverse array of research areas. In high school and early college, she worked in labs studying stem cells, microbiology, and even tomato genetics. Coming off of the 90’s biotech boom, Annegret first aimed to major in biotech in college, but she ended up feeling more inclined toward neuroscience. She conducted her honors thesis research in a small lab at Oberlin College in Ohio. However, it wasn’t until after college, during her time as a technician in Dr. David Perkel’s laboratory at the University of Washington, where she discovered her true passion for systems neuroscience through the study of behavior. The Perkel lab’s research on neural circuits of vocal learning in birds showed her what conducting research at a large research university involves. Her research in the Perkel lab also prompted her to familiarize herself with the seminal work of Dr. Wolfram Schulz, who discovered the role of dopamine in signaling reward prediction error, and how this signaling influences decision-making behavior. Inspired by these experiences, Annegret set out to pursue further schooling to better understand how decisions are made.
Annegret journeyed back across the country to pursue her PhD in neuroscience at Columbia University in New York City. She joined the laboratory of Dr. Mickey Goldberg, studying oculomotor decision-making in rhesus macaque monkeys. For her dissertation research, she studied how sensory variables are encoded in the brain during decision-making, and how competing sensory stimuli come to be represented or suppressed in this process. Annegret concentrated on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), a cortical brain region critical for initiating rapid eye movements (saccades) that shift gaze across the visual field. Using an array of tungsten electrodes implanted in the LIP, Annegret recorded electrical activity of neurons while the monkeys performed a visual memory task. Her first first-author publication in the Journal of Neuroscience details her discovery that LIP neurons are strongly suppressed by planned eye movements away from center of attentional focus, suggesting that they help shape a "priority map" for an animal's attention. These findings provide important insight into how the brain processes competing sensory inputs, contributing to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sensory decision-making and attention.
After completing her PhD, Annegret sought to expand her technical toolkit and explore new questions in systems neuroscience. She joined the laboratory of Dr. Dayu Lin at New York University, where she investigated the neural circuits underlying aggression in mice. Annegret was specifically interested in exploring voluntary aggression-seeking behavior, even in the absence of a threat. Annegret trained mice to nose poke for brief and repeated access to a weaker male mouse that they could attack. This task was designed to isolate the mouse’s motivation to engage in aggression, allowing for precise neural recordings that were time-locked to this readout of the mouse’s internal state. This trial-based behavior allowed Annegret to probe exactly how the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) is involved in aggression-seeking. Prior to Annegret’s work, the VMHvl was known to be involved in attacking behavior. By using this behavioral task in combination with electrophysiology, optogenetics, and fiber photometry she discovered that the VMHvl mediates both acute attack and aggression-seeking actions. Overall, Annegret’s postdoctoral work revealed that VMHvl neurons not only promote aggressive actions but also encode the internal state of aggression itself, providing insights into how motivational state influences neural coordination of social actions.
After a fruitful postdoctoral career, Annegret started her own lab at Princeton University in 2018. The Falkner lab’s mission is to investigate how social experiences change neural circuits and ultimately alter behavior. With this mission in mind, one branch of research that Annegret is passionate about pursuing is developing methods to better analyze social behavior. Seeing the value in studying complex naturalistic animal behaviors, she joined forces with like-minded colleagues at Princeton and NYU and played a small role in developing SLEAP, a deep learning multi-animal pose estimation tool for conducting unsupervised analyses of behavior—which is now one of the most widely used tools for behavior analyses by neuroscientists. Her lab combines these readouts of animal pose with other quantitative measures, including chemosensory marks (urine), vocalizations, and recordings of neural activity. The second branch of the Falkner lab is working at the intersection of systems neuroscience and neuroendocrinology. Annegret is particularly interested in how hormonal states alter neural networks that are sensitive to hormones (i.e., that express hormone receptors) to ultimately coordinate a shift in behavior. Combining SLEAP analyses of behavior with cutting-edge multi-site fiber photometry recordings and high-density electrophysiology, Annegret and her lab have continued delving into the world of aggressive behaviors. They ask the questions: what behavior strategies are used when mice practice aggression, and what skills can mice learn from aggression experiences that translate usefully in a new context? Together, the Falkner lab’s research has already begun to illuminate how neural networks underlying social behaviors change as a function of experience and hormonal influence.
As a new PI, Annagret was initially overwhelmed by the amount of multitasking that was asked of her. Between building her lab, hiring and advising new people, and developing courses, she felt it was “like having a firehose of information and obligations in your face that you can’t turn off.” Since then, Annegret has learned to block off protected time for herself to think, read, and get her bearings. While she does miss the hands-on aspects of conducting research at the bench, Annegret has found joy in designing experiments, working through her lab members’ data, and grant writing—calling it a time to “spin out the possibility space” and firm up ideas.
As a mentor, Annegret empowers her lab members to collaborate and innovate, fostering an environment where everyone’s strengths contribute to the collective scientific mission. Her philosophy of science was significantly shaped by her own mentors. In her process of growth as a scientist, she found that “in Mickey’s lab, I learned how to think. In Dayu’s lab, I learned how to work.” Now, she combines these lessons to encourage her team to think critically and approach their innovative research with intellectual rigor and creativity. By challenging and supporting her lab members, Annegret has cultivated a collaborative ecosystem where curiosity and teamwork drive meaningful discoveries.
Find out more about Annegret and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Meenakshi’s full interview with Annegret on August 23, 2024 below!
