Leslie Claire Griffith

Leslie Claire Griffith, the Nancy Lurie Marks Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University, studies the biochemistry of behavior. Her lab investigates how the nervous system integrates information and generates behavioral outputs on a biochemical, cellular and organism level using a species of fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Griffith’s pioneering research with flies has opened up new insight into the human brain. Flies, like humans, have basic behaviors that can be altered by the animal’s internal state or by exposure to external cues. Griffith’s lab uses video and automated monitoring systems to assess locomotion, circadian rhythms, sleep and memory formation. Her work integrates these whole-animal data with information from the cellular and biochemical levels to build a multi-level understanding of how the brain uses experience to modify behavior.

Griffith was born in Michigan and raised in a small town on the shores of Lake Superior. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, where she got interested in research, working for three years on a project to understand the effects of methylxanthines such as caffeine on the hypothalamic/pituitary axis. After receiving her B.S., she went to Stanford University where she did her M.D. and Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr. Howard Schulman, working on rat brain Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II. The intriguing biochemistry of this enzyme suggested that it might be an integral part of the molecular machinery underlying memory formation and Griffith decided to move to a genetic model organism, Drosophila, in order to test these ideas. Following a short postdoc at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in Nutley, New Jersey, Griffin joined the faculty of the Biology Department at Brandeis University in 1992 where her research has expanded from the biochemical to the behavioral and systems levels.