Prabaha Gangopadhyay

I grew up in Shyamnagar, a town in the outskirts of Kolkata and recently moved to New Haven to pursue a PhD in Psychology at Yale University, with a focus in Neuroscience. I spent the last 5 years at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where I completed a 4-year Bachelors' degree, followed by a 1-year Masters' degree, both in biology. The time I spent in the academic institutions so far has enabled me to explore multiple facets of my interest in Biology, which helped me discover the questions I am truly passionate about.

A few decades down my research career, I wish to have answered at least parts of these questions:

• How are complex animal social behaviors encoded neurally?

• What makes animals compete, and what makes them cooperate? Can we understand the neural signals underlying these behaviors?

• What are the innate and learned components of such behavior, and how did they evolve?

I am currently working on some of these with my PhD advisor, Dr. Steve Chang. We are investigating the foraging strategies employed by Rhesus macaques when they are competing for resources and trying to understand how the firing patterns of single neurons in their brains change, depending on the strategies employed.