Newsmaker: Alison Barth

Age: 40

Residence: Shadyside

Family: Husband, Wayne Wu, and two daughters

Occupation: Associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon University

Background: Barth earned her bachelor's degree in biology from Brown University in 1991. She was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation, and earned her doctorate in molecular and cell biology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997. She joined the CMU faculty in 2002.

Noteworthy: Barth recently received a research award from Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It allows her to spend seven months working on projects at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. Her research includes studying how the body's neurons encode memory. She will apply that research to examining neurons in the intact brain, with the hope of gaining a better understanding of how neurons program information in the cerebral cortex.

Quote: " I will be using (the opportunity) to learn some really cutting-edge techniques to study neurological function and dysfunction. This is such an exciting time to be studying the brain. We are poised to come to some very fundamental understandings about how this collection of cells works together."