Journal of Comparative Neurology

Leah Krubitzer received her Bachelor’s degree in speech pathology from Pennsylvania State University and joined Vanderbilt University for her doctoral studies in psychology and neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Jon Kaas. After receiving her PhD she became a Research Fellow in Vision, Touch, and Hearing Centre, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, at the University of Queensland, Australia, where she worked with Dr. Mike Calford. She then returned to the USA as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, where she currently is Distinguished Professor.

Throughout her career, Dr. Krubitzer has led innovative and pioneering work on the functional interactions of environments and brain organization in mammals, specifically studying adaptive patterns of evolution in the cerebral cortex. Her work uncovered the remarkable ability of the mammalian neocortex to adapt over time to the physical demands of particular ecological niches, enabling an organism optimally to adapt behavior to its environment. Her studies provide a comprehensive perspective over mammalian brain evolution and adaptation, by accessing a vast array of species characterized by different habitats, diel patterns, and social characteristics, ultimately representing most extant mammalian orders in an assessment of relationships between lifestyles and morphological specializations and cortical cellular organization at the level of neural systems. Her experiments manipulating the amount of sensory experience during development have revealed a massive potential for cortical functional reorganization of specific sensory channels, altering their fundamental gene-dependent basic organization and resulting in environment-related remodeling of cortical connectivity and function. These findings have significant implications for understanding morphologic and physiologic mechanisms of multisensory plasticity that occur in congenital sensory loss in human, and to develop interventional strategies and novel therapeutic avenues.

Dr. Krubitzer has received many honors and awards for her research, including a MacArthur Award from the MacArthur Foundation, the Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomists, a Krieg Cortical Scholar Award from the Cajal Club. She presented the 2022 James Arthur Lecture at the American Museum of the Natural History in New York, and is the incoming President of the Cajal Club.