Mazen Kheirbek, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, the Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience at UCSF. He performed his undergraduate work at Washington University in St. Louis, received his PhD in neurobiology from the University of Chicago and completed his postdoctoral work at Columbia University. Since 2016 he has led a systems neuroscience research group housed in the Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF. His group uses behavioral analysis, optogenetic tools, anatomical tools, computational methods, electrophysiological and imaging techniques to identify circuits that generate emotional behavior. In recent years, his group and collaborators have made a number of important contributions including: discovering circuits by which the hippocampus modulates emotional behavior, a role for adult generated hippocampal neurons in behavior, the encoding properties of the hippocampal dentate gyrus and a role for white matter plasticity in recall of fear memories. Dr. Kheirbek’s group have won numerous awards for their work, including The Freedman Prize Honorable Mention from BBRF, the One Mind Institute Rising Star Award, an HFSP Young Investigator Award, a Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship and a McKnight Foundation Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award.