Priya Rajasethupathy grew up in
Brockport, New York. She received her
Bachelor of Arts degree in
biology with a
pre-medicine concentration from
Cornell University in 2004. For her undergraduate thesis, she identified
Aptamers that provided structural and functional insight into therapeutic compounds for epilepsy. Following her Bachelors, she moved to India for a year to work with people with mental illness, while also conducting neuroscience research at the
National Centre for Biological Sciences in
Bangalore. Rajasethupathy later identified a new class of small non-coding RNAs in the CNS – piRNAs – which were thought to be present only in
germ cells and germline tissues. Furthermore, she found that piRNAs can
epigenetically modify DNA to enable long-lasting changes in synaptic strength, which may provide insight into the maintenance of long-term memories. Following her graduate career, Rajasethupathy began a postdoctoral fellowship in 2013 in the laboratory of
Karl Deisseroth, a pioneer in the field of
optogenetics. There, she discovered a novel brain pathway from the prefrontal cortex to hippocampus that is required for memory retrieval. She used mice as a
model organism and employed techniques in
optogenetics to control and monitor individual neurons in living tissue,
two-photon excitation microscopy to image living tissue, and volumetric gene expression profiles of intact brain to understand how the
gene expression directs brain activity during behavior. Her postdoctoral work earned her recognition from
Science News, who named her one of their top 10 early career scientists in 2015. == Research ==