Meg A. Younger, PhD

(she/her)

Meg joined the Boston University faculty in January of 2022. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and an affiliate of the Center for Systems Neuroscience and the Neurophotonics Center.

Meg received a BS in Neural Science in 2004 from New York University. As an undergraduate, she worked with Justin Blau at New York University on circadian rhythms in Drosophila and with David Spray at Albert Einstein College of Medicine on mammalian gap junction channels. She then earned a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco in 2013, working with Graeme Davis, where she studied the homeostatic regulation of neurotransmitter release in Drosophila. She conducted her postdoctoral research with Leslie Vosshall at the Rockefeller University/HHMI where she focused on the neurobiology Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Her postdoctoral work combined genetic approaches, neuroanatomy, and two-photon calcium imaging to study the mosquito sensory neurobiology that underlies two reproductive behaviors, the search for a person to bite and the selection of a site to lay eggs.

Meg was awarded the Sherrington, Charles Barbeiri, and Phi Beta Kappa Research prizes for her undergraduate research and a Genentech Fellowship for her graduate work. She was a 2014 Grass Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She was awarded a Leon Levy Neuroscience Fellowship in 2015, a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2016, and a Kavli Neural Systems Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2018. In 2022 Meg was named a Searle Scholar and a recipient of a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in Neuroscience, and in 2023 she received a Smith Family Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research. She was named a Sloan Research Fellow and a Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2024.