Lucia Prieto-Godino, PhD
Lucia Prieto-Godino is a group leader at The Francis Crick Institute in London, UK. Lucia completed her undergraduate degree at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, and at the University of Lund in Sweden. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in the UK and then joined the University of Lausanne in Switzerland for her postdoc, before starting her group at The Crick in 2018. She is a 2018 FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence Scholar. She has received multiple awards including the FENS EJN Young Investigator Prize in 2018, the 2018 L’Oreal-UNESCO for women in science Award, the 2019 Women of the Future Award and the 2021 Allen Distinguished Investigator Award. In addition to her research, Lucia is the founding director of TReND in Africa (www.TReNDinAfrica.org), a non-profit organisation that promotes science across the African continent. TReND has trained and supported nearly 1,000 African scientists across 25 different countries and its outreach events have impacted over 10,000 people.
Research in the Prieto-Godino laboratory focuses on understanding at the network, cellular and genetic level how neural circuits develop, function, and evolve. How did the wide variety of behaviours we see nowadays evolve? To address this question, we use a multidisciplinary approach, integrating a suite of advanced neuroscience methods such as cross-species comparative connectomics, volumetric imaging, electrophysiology, single-cell transcriptomics and genetic manipulation.