Yaara Lefler

Yaara has been a postdoctoral fellow in Tiago Branco’s lab since summer 2015. She studies how neurons in the mouse midbrain compute the choice between escape and freezing when animals are facing threatening stimuli. She is using intracellular whole cell recordings and extracellular probe recordings in head-restrained mice to gain access to the synaptic and network mechanisms that are taking place during these instinctive behaviours.

Yaara did her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the lab of Prof. Yosef Yarom, where she studied the electrical coupling and subthreshold oscillations in the inferior olive nucleus, using electrophysiological techniques in acute slices.