We couldn’t be more thrilled to announce that our PhD candidate, Oren Princz-Lebel, successfully defended on June 27th. She has worked incredibly hard and helped pioneer the use of fibre photometry (both recording and analyzes) in the lab. She also improved the Visuomotor Conditional Learning VMCL test for mice, which has now become the standard SOP for the task!

Oren’s accomplishments are many, some of which can be read in the “transcript” (really a launching pad) of Tim’s introduction of Oren prior to her defense talk:

Oren came to us from UBC in 2018, highly recommended by her undergraduate mentors Jason Snyder and Stan Floresco. She was recommended to us as being “very bright, motivated and self-reliant” as well as “meticulous and reliable”.

These observations have most definitely been confirmed in Oren’s time with us. She has been a dynamic and engaged student since she arrived, and has created many exciting research opportunities for herself, including winning funding not long after she arrived to participate in a Cajal Advanced Training Program in Bordeaux, France – where she learned about fibre photometry – and agreeing to give a symposium talk in Korea just before the pandemic started. Unusual for a student at her stage, she has also given invited talks at departmental colloquia, including at UBC and SFU.

Beyond her outstanding research accomplishments, Oren is a committed educator, and has mentored many undergraduates in our lab in addition to earning formal Teaching Mentor and Advanced Teaching Certificates from Western. Oren has also played an extremely active role in supporting our community. She has served in various roles in SONGS, including as Mentorship Committee Chair, as a Neuroscience Research Day organizer and as the Executive Academic Coordinator, and has also served on various committees for the Western Institute of Neuroscience including on the search committee for the Director.

Oren’s research program has brought together multiple cutting-edge and complex techniques to address questions about the role of dopamine in stimulus-response learning and habitual behaviour, and implications of this for synucleinopathies including Parkinson’s disease.

We are so proud of her for achieving this milestone and can’t wait to hear about her next great adventure: motherhood!