25th Anniversary Symposium

Robert Desimone, Director, McGovern Institute, MIT, Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience
Welcoming Remarks

25th Anniversary Video 
A look at the past 25 years of the McGovern Institute

Robert Desimone, Director, McGovern Institute, MIT, Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience
The future of the McGovern Institute

Phillip A. Sharp, Founding Director, McGovern Institute; Institute Professor emeritus, MIT; Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT

Lore Harp McGovern, Co-Founder, McGovern Institute, MIT

Robert S. Langer, Institute Professor, MIT; Board Member, McGovern Institute, MIT
An engineering road not taken: from research to clinical translation

Break, Atrium

Young Alumni Talks, introductions from Ev Fedorenko, Investigator, McGovern Institute, MIT

• Xian Gao, Emugen Therapeutics LLC
  Developing and preclinical testing of gene therapy for severe ASD with Shank3 mutations
• Mark Howe, Boston University
  Landscape of neuromodulatory signals for learning, unlearning, and action
• Dmitriy Aronov, Columbia University/HHMI
  Using food-caching chickadees to study memory in the brain
• Jakob Voigts, HHMI Janelia Research Campus
  Neural dynamics underlying sequential reasoning in naturalistic behavior
• Anya Ivanova, Georgia Tech
  Dissociating language and thought in humans and in machines
• Jenelle Feather, Flatiron Institute
  Discriminating Representations with Principal Distortions

Panel Discussion for Young Alumni
The Road Taken: Life After McGovern

Nergis Mavalvala, Dean of School of Science, MIT 
Closing Remarks

Reception, Atrium

Young Alumni Bios

Dmitriy Aronov is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his Ph.D. at MIT working on the song system of zebra finches, followed by a postdoc at Princeton University working on the rodent hippocampus. In his own lab, he developed food-caching birds, chickadees, as a new model system for neuroscience research. His team develops behavioral paradigms for working on the natural behavior of these wild birds in the lab. They also work on miniaturized technologies for recording and manipulations in the chickadee brain. By using this exciting new system, Dmitriy Aronov’s lab hopes to gain insight into the neural mechanisms of episodic memory.

Jenelle Feather is a Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Neuroscience. In Fall 2025, she will be starting at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience Institute and Psychology Department. Her research bridges neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on computational models of perceptual systems. Feather received a Ph.D. from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 2022 and a dual S.B. in Physics and Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2013.

Xian Gao is the Director of Translational Biology at Emugen Therapeutics, a biotechnology company dedicated to developing transformative gene therapies for neurological diseases. She completed her Ph.D. training through a joint program between East China Normal University and MIT, followed by postdoctoral research with Dr. Guoping Feng at MIT. During her doctoral and postdoctoral training, Dr. Gao developed genetically engineered mouse models to investigate neurological disorders and pioneered novel gene therapy approaches in both rodent and non-human primate models. In her current role, she focuses on advancing preclinical programs through robust preclinical validation and translational strategies.

Mark Howe is an Assistant Professor at Boston University in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. His lab develops and applies optical approaches in mice to investigate the neural mechanisms of motivation, sensori-motor integration, and learning in health and disease. He completed his Ph.D in Ann Graybiel’s lab in the McGovern Institute at MIT and did his postdoctoral training with Daniel Dombeck at Northwestern University.

Anna (Anya) Ivanova is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Techology, where she heads the Language, Intelligence, and Thought (LIT) lab. She got her PhD from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science and carried out her postdoctoral training at MIT Quest for Intelligence. In her research, Anya is examining the language-thought relationship in humans and in large language models using a synergistic combination of human brain imaging, behavioral studies, and computational modeling. She has been named one of the 35 Innovators under 35 by MIT Tech Review 2024.

Jakob Voigts is a Group Leader at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. He studied math at the university of Heidelberg where he became interested in neuroscience in Sakmann lab, working on active sensation with Tansu Celikel. He subsequently did his PhD work on cortical change detection with Chris Moore and Emery Brown at MIT, and worked on open-source neuroscience tools. He then studied dendritic computations and cortical sequential reasoning as a postdoc in Mark Harnett’s lab at MIT. Today, his lab uses natural behaviors to study how the brain can build internal models of the world from limited data.