Noopur Amin is deeply interested in empathy and compassion, both as a guidepost for her personal daily life, and as a calling to uncover its neural basis as a neuroscientist. She is currently a postdoc at UC Berkeley in Dr. Daniela Kaufer’s lab, where she is studying the neural basis of empathy and prosocial behaviors in rodent models using an integrative approach and applying molecular, physiological, and behavioral techniques. Her current research projects include: 1) investigating the hormonal basis and neural circuits mediating helping behavior; and 2) studying early life stress-induced alterations in neurogenesis, cell proliferation and migration. For her graduate career, she obtained a Ph.D. in the Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley in Dr. Frederic Theunissen’s computational and auditory physiology songbird lab. There she used in vivo neurophysiological recordings and systems-level analyses to investigate the processing of complex natural sounds and the roles of development and patterned acoustic experience on shaping high-level auditory neural responses.
