Carolina Borges-Merjane , Dr.

Dr. Carolina Borges-Merjane was born in Brazil and studied Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the University of California San Diego (U.S.A.). After obtaining her Bachelor of Science, she joined the lab of Laurence Trussell at the Vollum Institute and Oregon Health & Science University (U.S.A) for her PhD thesis. For her dissertation, she studied glutamatergic synaptic transmission from mossy fiber terminals to unipolar brush cells of the cerebellum and dorsal cochlear nucleus, with electrophysiology and confocal microscopy.

After finishing her PhD in 2015, she joined the lab of Professor Peter Jonas at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria, where she was a Marie-Curie Individual Fellow, EMBO Long-Term Fellow and FWF Elise Richter Fellow. She is using electrophysiology and electron microscopy with optogenetics, correlating function and structure, to study synaptic transmission properties under basal and plasticity states, at the hippocampal mossy fiber to CA3 pyramidal neuron synapse in hippocampus.