Dr. Christine Constantinople
Assistant Professor, New York University, New York, USA
Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA
PhD, Columbia University, New York, USA
A younger, not-yet-Dr. Christine Constantinople would have been shocked to learn that her future self would go on to become a scientist. No one in her family was a scientist or an academic, and the way science was taught in school left her with the impression that most of it was “solved” already, anyway. During her first lab experience as an undergrad, however, her perspective on science radically shifted. She was amazed at how much was still unknown in neuroscience, and that “people were just studying how the brain works because it was a viable job you could have…you could wear jeans to work and look at neurons under a microscope!” Little did she know, she would go on to do precisely that and more. Today, as an Assistant Professor at New York University, she studies the neural basis of economic decision-making using computational modeling, high-throughout behavioral training, and neural circuit dissection.
Many years before she would become a neuroscience professor there, Christine started college at NYU with a particular interest in politics and international relations. However, the slow pace she experienced in a few internships with government offices left her feeling dissatisfied. Meanwhile, to fulfill NYU’s science class requirements, Christine took a neuroscience class for non-science majors and was unexpectedly blown away. As she started volunteering in the neuroscience professor’s lab, she was struck by the contrast from her government internships. For instance, the transparency and accountability that she had found wanting in government was “baked-in” to science. “It was self-correcting and honest in a way that I found – and still find – very refreshing,” she reflects. From that point forward, Christine set her sights on a career in neuroscience.
For her PhD, Christine moved to the other end of Manhattan to attend Columbia University. She joined the new lab of Dr. Randy Bruno and embarked on a project seeking to understand how synaptic connectivity shapes neurons’ response to external stimuli. With rats as her experimental subjects, she focused on the neural circuitry supporting how they use their whiskers to perceive the sensory world. The canonical understanding of sensory systems like the whisker system was that sensory information is passed along by the thalamus to layer 4 of the cortex. From there, layer 4 distributes that information through the rest of the cortical layers, including deeper layers, which then send it to other parts of the brain. However, there are also some thalamic projections directly to the deeper layers of the cortex, and it was not known whether these seemingly deviant connections also carry meaningful sensory information. Using a challenging technique for recording intracellular activity from cortical neurons in living rats, Christine found that these stray thalamocortical connections to deeper cortical layers also conveyed tactile information from the whiskers, even when layer 4 was silenced. Thus, Christine identified an additional, parallel pathway that acts as a shortcut to the deeper layers. This was both a significant technical achievement and conceptual advance in the field and yielded a highly cited paper in Science.
After earning her PhD with flying colors, Christine was ready for a new challenge. Given her experience with circuit organization and electrophysiology, she was particularly keen to learn behavior and two-photon imaging and identified the labs of Drs. David Tank and Carlos Brody at Princeton as places of interest. When neither PI responded to her initial emails, Christine hung out around the posters from David Tank’s lab at a conference and waited for the opportunity to introduce herself and inquire about postdoc opportunities in-person. This approach proved fruitful, and she ultimately joined the Tank and Brody labs to work on a joint project developing an approach for two-photon imaging in behaving rats.
While Christine had specifically sought out a challenge for her postdoc, it turned out to be a bit more than she’d bargained for. Having chosen a starkly different project from her PhD work, the learning curve was significant – learning behavior, coding, and imaging all at once – and she felt like a “first-year graduate student” all over again. Moreover, her postdoc project proved to be exceptionally challenging and more focused on technical development as opposed to hypothesis-testing than she had anticipated. One of many challenges was that, because of rats’ much larger size and greater strength compared to mice, traditional head-fixation techniques used for two-photon imaging in mice were not feasible, so she and another postdoc were trying to train rats to voluntarily self-headfix to enable imaging. Although they ultimately succeeded, Christine was feeling so disheartened after a few years of this that she no longer enjoyed her work and even questioned its significance. She approached her advisors to express her unhappiness and intent to pursue opportunities outside of academic science. While they were exceptionally supportive, Carlos brought up the possibility of simply changing her project, as opposed to leaving the lab and her career aspirations in research altogether. Christine hadn’t even considered that this was a viable option, but indeed, it was the specific project that was making her unhappy, not research itself.
Once given the opportunity to develop her own, new postdoc project from the ground up, Christine began to thrive. She decided to develop a behavioral assay that would test value-based decision-making in rats, in contrast to sensory-driven decision-making which was the primary focus of the Brody and Tank labs. This was inspired – perhaps harkening back to her earliest interests in government and politics – by her interest in an influential and Nobel Prize-winning theory in economics known as Prospect theory, which models humans’ choice behavior under uncertain conditions and explains its varied suboptimalities and idiosyncrasies. She found that she could recapitulate in rats many of the same features of economic decision-making observed in humans and that a reinforcement learning model best explained the trial-to-trial variation in rats’ behavior. She further showed through manipulations and electrophysiological recordings that the orbitofrontal cortex represents the outcomes of prior decisions and contributes to their trial-by-trial adjustments in behavior.
Christine remembers this later period of her postdoc as a fun but very intense time. When she received a K99 award from the NIH earlier than she expected, it set a two-year limit on the rest of her postdoc and thus on the time to complete this new project. Also, she was newly pregnant! Then, she found out her dream school and department – the Center for Neural Science at NYU – was having a job search, and she was advised to apply even though she wasn’t sure she was quite ready. She got an interview but was so anxious that her job talk didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. Though devastated, she psyched herself up for the second day of her interviews and gave a chalk talk of which she was really proud. Christine got the job and thus returned to the very place where she had first discovered her love for neuroscience, this time as a professor.
Today, Christine’s lab studies the neural bases of value-based economic decision-making. Using high-throughput and automated behavioral training in rats as they ‘pay with their time’ for different rewards, they investigate the neural circuits and neuromodulatory mechanisms that support rats’ decisions of how long they are willing to wait for a given reward. Furthermore, using automated behavioral training to generate vast amounts of behavioral data in a more efficient and less laborious way than typical behavioral approaches gives them sufficient statistical power to explore individual differences in rats’ choice behavior. While the scientific fruit of this labor has been sweet, so too has been the unexpected degree of gratification Christine has felt in mentoring her trainees and watching them succeed. Perhaps many of her young trainees will also be hit with the realization that looking at neurons under a microscope while wearing jeans is a viable career path that they, too, might like to pursue.
Find out more about Christine and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Christine on June 14, 2025 below!
