Marissa Mueller

Marissa studies the role of the cortex and cortical neurodevelopment on brain disease and degeneration. Namely, she is characterising how chronic genetic manipulations to cortical layer 5-6b projection neuron subpopulations can lead to neuroanatomical and physiological deficits. Her work broadly involves immunohistochemistry, microscopy, automated cell quantification and reconstruction techniques, hardware and software development, longitudinal behavioural studies, multimodal neuroimaging (MRI), and cell density/distribution/morphology correlations. These efforts seek to better-understand the relevance of cortical layer 5-6b manipulations to a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders (including but not limited to motor neurone disease, epilepsy, autism, anxiety, and sleep and brain-state perturbations), thereby informing the development earlier disease interventions.

Marissa is from Petrolia, Canada. She earned a BSc in Engineering from the University of Iowa (biomedical engineering, with a focus in stem cells and regenerative medicine) and a MSc in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford (experimental psychology, with research projects involving sleep physiology). She is currently in her final year of studying for a DPhil in Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics (neuroscience, with research projects involving brain development and degeneration). Outside academia, Marissa enjoys nature, athletics, travelling, board games, and music.