Kate O’Connor-Giles, Ph.D.

Dr. O'Connor-Giles concentrates on helping individuals to achieve their goals, no matter what they are, as well as instilling the need for and practice of innovation, rigor, and resilience in her trainees. She has developed a peer-to-peer mentoring program that fosters mentoring values through trainees at all career stages. Through shared values of empathy, inclusivity, and accountability, she has actively cultivated a dynamic research group that supports one another through research and life challenges. Dr. O'Connor-Giles studies how synapses form, how they are organized for specific release properties, and how they are reorganized to modulate circuit function. The lab also focuses on identifying and characterizing new conserved synaptic genes, and on developing gene editing approaches for in vivo screening.