Priya Rajasethupathy

Priya Rajasethupathy is an Indian-American neuroscientist and assistant professor at Rockefeller University, leading the Laboratory of Neural Dynamics and Cognition.

Education and early career 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 treatment of epilepsy. Following her Bachelor's degree, 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 previously 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 the intact brain to understand how gene expression directs brain activity during behavior. Her research is supported by an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, which supports high risk, high reward projects driven by young scientists with $2.5 million awarded over the course of five years.

Selected publications Rajasethupathy, P. et al. Targeting neural circuits. Cell 165, 524–534 (2016). Sylwestrak, E.L. et al. Multiplexed intact-tissue transcriptional analysis at cellular resolution. Cell 164, 792–804 (2016) Top 10 Early Career Scientists, Science News, 2015 NIH Director's New Innovator Award, 2017 Searle Scholar, 2018 Klingenstein-Simons Fellow, Simons Foundation and the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, 2018