Dr. Egzona Morina
Principal Investigator, Environmental Neuroscience Research Incubator
Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD, University College of London
Growing up, Dr. Egzona Morina didn’t know what neuroscience was. She was focused on a very different pursuit; as the fifth ranked tennis player in Belgium by her junior year of high school, she was getting ready to move across the Atlantic to attend university on a tennis scholarship in the US. However, as soon as she discovered the field of neuroscience, she immediately knew it was the right career for her. Now as a Principal Investigator at the Environmental Neuroscience Research Incubator and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard University, Egzona has shifted to studying how the environment (e.g. pollution or noise) impacts brain health and cognition.
Egzona is originally from Kosovo, but when war broke out, her family fled as refugees to Belgium when she was only four years old. She spent the rest of her childhood in Belgium, where she first got involved with tennis. On a tennis scholarship at a university in the US, Egzona studied clinical psychology and originally intended to be a medical doctor. However, Egzona had a gut feeling that psychology, although interesting, wasn’t quite right for her. After finishing her undergraduate degree and while working at a tennis club, she met someone studying neuroscience on a night out. She hadn’t heard of the field as a career before, and as soon as it was described to her, she knew she had found what she wanted to do.
She applied to masters programs in Neuroscience and ended up attending a program at Columbia University in New York City. The coursework was initially challenging as she had to learn a lot of the hard sciences, topics that weren’t taught in her psychology undergraduate coursework. She also was trying to find a lab to volunteer in so she could try her hand at neuroscience research, and secured an interview in the lab of Dr. Robert Froemke at NYU. In her interview, Egzona told him that she had never done research before; if he left her alone in the lab, she wasn’t sure what would happen. However, she told him she was an incredibly hard worker and would be in every day if he allowed her to join the lab. He replied, “Great, can you start tomorrow?”
Her time in the Froemke lab, first as a volunteer and then as a technician and lab manager, was idyllic. Egzona vividly remembers the first time she made a slide for staining and successfully put the cover slip on without bubbles. Her excitement about that moment is still palpable today, years later. Egzona reasoned that if she could get excited by something so seemingly mundane, she was in the right field. Armed with this excitement and confidence in her decisions, Egzona applied for PhD programs. Although she wasn’t admitted to any programs her first round, she applied again, and was soon headed to the UK to pursue a PhD at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center for Neuroscience at the University College London.
Egzona decided to do her PhD on anticipatory voluntary movements, inspired by those small adjustments tennis players make before they dive for a ball. She trained mice to stand on a platform and measured the pressure they exerted right before they made a large voluntary movement. Egzona’s thesis work established a new behavioral paradigm that enabled her to perform an in-depth characterization of the postural adjustments that mice (like humans) make in preparation for larger movements .
When Egzona returned to Kosovo for a holiday during her PhD, she was struck by how few people knew what a neuroscientist was. Egzona, who is ethnically Albanian, wanted to bring knowledge of her newfound passion back home. She returned to her program in the UK and petitioned to start a brain camp, a one-week program in which Egzona and other students from her program went to Kosovo to teach high schoolers about neuroscience. While doing this program, she met one student who had been accepted to the Yale Scholars Summer Program but did not have the funds to pay for it. Egzona procured donations from the families she had formerly given tennis lessons to back in New York and put the money in a non-profit to fund the student’s program at Yale. She named the organization the Xheladin and Xhufe Morina Foundation, after her parents. The non-profit has since grown and continues to help fund students from Kosovo so that they can explore STEM research and education.
After finishing her PhD, Egzona and her husband decided to move to the US. Her husband got a post-doctoral fellow position at MIT. This was a time of intellectual exploration for Egzona. After about a year in the US she decided to do a postdoc at MIT in the field of digital learning in biology, where she learned how to combine neuroscience and education, something she was passionate about after her experiences teaching neuroscience in Kosovo. However, Egzona missed the day to day of lab work, and was interested in making her way back to the research world. Serendipitously, while at MIT, she happened to attend a talk about climate science and the environment. She immediately became engrossed in “environmental neuroscience”—the study of how our environment affects our brains.
Enthralled by this field, Egzona decided she wanted to start doing experiments and answering her own questions about the role our environment plays in shaping our cognitive processes and cognitive load. However, she couldn’t find a lab that was working on the exact questions she was interested in. She decided to start doing research as part of the non-profit she had founded earlier, creating a lab (for which she is the PI) called the Environmental Neuroscience Research Incubator (ENRI). She got a small grant and bought an EEG system, got IRB approval to run EEG studies on human patients, and began doing her own research. Her most recent study was using EEG waveforms to assess the effect of noise on cognitive resilience, adaptation, and focus. She found that a person’s performance might not suffer with noise, but the brain must employ more cognitive processes for the same task if noise is present. She is now trying to take this experiment one step further— to predict an individual’s cognitive performance using only inputs from their environment.
She describes this new pursuit as ideal for her, channeling a bit of the healthy competitive feelings and incredible self-drive that made her so successful in tennis. With the help of Egzona’s incredible passion for the topic of environmental neuroscience, we will certainly see this blossoming field grow and our understanding of how extrinsic factors shape the way our brains work deepen.
Find out more about Egzona and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Egzona on Feb. 23, 2026 below!
