Dr. Kelley received her graduate and post-doctoral training at the Rockefeller University. With Donald Pfaff (Ph.D.) and Fernando Nottebohm (post-doctoral), she used neuroanatomical and behavioral methods to examine neural circuitry for courtship and other reproductive behaviors. She established her laboratory in the Neuroscience Program at Princeton, focusing on how steroid hormones direct the development of neural and muscular elements for vocalization, moving to Columbia in 1981 to join the Department of Biological Sciences as an Associate Professor. Current work in her laboratory ranges from molecular cloning to neurophysiology to field studies of animal communication. She is HHMI Professor of Biological Sciences and Editor of the Journal of Neurobiology. Dr. Kelley has twice been named a Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator.

Professor Kelley has had a distinguished track record in neuroscience training and education. She founded the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior with John Koester, and has served as Co-Director of the program from its inception. Dr. Kelley directs a graduate course on Neuroethology and also co-directs the Responsible Conduct of Science course. She co-teaches Developmental and Systems Neuroscience and Experimental Approaches in the Neural Sciences. With science colleagues at Columbia, she developed a new undergraduate core course for all entering College students, Frontiers of Science. From 1985–1989, Dr. Kelley was Director of the Neural Systems and Behavior course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. She is currently Chair of the Neuroscience Educators Award committee of the Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Kelley has been a member of the HHMI  predoctoral review committee and a member of the NST and NIH Roadmap study  sections (NIH). She served as scientific consultant to the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and to two NIH-funded programs at predominantly minority institutions: the City University of New York (RCMI) and the University of Puerto Rico (COBRE). Dr. Kelley is co-author of a contribution to the widely used textbook, Behavioral Neuroendocrinology  (Becker,  Breedlove and Crews; MIT Press).

CAROL MASON, PhD

Dr. Mason received her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in invertebrate zoology and endocrinology, and postdoctoral training at Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago with Ray Guillery in the cellular anatomy of the developing and mature cat visual system.  Dr. Mason joined the Columbia faculty in 1987, having been at New York University School of Medicine for seven years.  She is currently Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology and a member of the Department of Neuroscience. Dr. Mason's interests focus on the development of circuitry in the visual system and the cerebellum. In the visual system, she has addressed how retinal ganglion cell axons navigate through the optic chiasm to targets in the brain, focusing on growth cone behaviors, and the cellular and molecular cues mediating this process. Her work on the cerebellum has focused on afferent axon development and the development of dendrites and spines. Dr. Mason held a Jacob Javits Investigator award from 1992-1997.

Dr. Mason has trained numerous undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students in developmental neurobiology in research from the anatomical, cellular and molecular points of view. Dr. Mason sits on thesis committees of students in the Neurobiology, Integrated, Biological Sciences and MD-PhD programs. She has served on the steering committee for the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior, and is currently director of the Vision Science Training Program at Columbia. Teaching activities include co-directorship of a graduate course in Neural Development, lectures on early visual experience and on regeneration in the Neural Science Course for medical students, and on eye development in the Basic Science Course in Ophthalmology. Dr. Mason is currently a Councilor of the Society for Neuroscience and an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow.

KENNETH MILLER, PhD

Dr. Miller is Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and a member of the Department of Neuroscience. He was on the faculty at UCSF for 11 years, before moving to Columbia in 2004, where he co-founded Columbia’s Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.  Dr. Miller is a leading modeler of the primary visual cortex (V1), long one of the key model systems for understanding the function, circuitry, and development of the cerebral cortex. He entered graduate school in physics at Stanford before transferring to the Stanford Neuroscience Ph.D. program. The modeling portion of his thesis, on the development of ocular dominance columns in V1, was published as an article in Science and became one of the seminal early works in the new field of theoretical neuroscience. Since then, his work has had two major foci: the mechanisms underlying the development of other aspects of V1 circuitry and more general  analyses of developmental models; and using modeling to determine the structure (or experimentally distinguishable alternative possible structures) of the circuitry underlying the mature functional response properties and activity  patterns of V1 neurons, along with determining how to generalize from this specific cortical circuit to more general computations undertaken by cortical circuitry.

Dr. Miller has had extensive experience in and a strong commitment to interdisciplinary graduate training in theoretical neuroscience. He was formerly co-Director of a Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco, which focused on postdoctoral trainees.  Many trainees in the program had quantitative training but little or no prior neuroscience knowledge, and Dr. Miller thus has ample experience with both the successes and failures of such interdisciplinary conversions. He has extensive experience teaching theoretical neuroscience, including the basics of the associated mathematical and computational methods, to a broad range of neuroscience or biology graduate students. Since moving to Columbia he has served on the steering committee for the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior.