New Faculty Scholars Choose to Return to Israel @AssafRamot @TelAvivUni Although stress is widely known to influence learning, Assaf Ramot has long been interested in how stress reshapes neural circuits—the patterns of activity and interaction between networks of neurons. His PhD research in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science identified the cellular mechanisms by which chronic stress alters the circuits that regulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the brain’s central stress-response system. For his postdoctoral training, two years of which were funded by a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr. Ramot sought to develop the tools to study behavior, learning, and adaptive plasticity at the level of neural populations and circuit dynamics. He therefore moved to the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. He was part of a lab known for pioneering in vivo imaging of neural circuits in awake, behaving animals. There, he studied the neural circuit mechanisms that allow practice to transform variable movements into skilled actions. He showed that during learned movements, the motor thalamus provides the strongest input to the primary motor cortex. zuckermanstem.org/scholars/d…