Elizabeth Buffalo

Chair & Professor, Department of Physiology and Biophysics
CV

Beth Buffalo is a neuroscientist whose lab focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms that support learning and memory. Dr. Buffalo is widely recognized for her studies on the relationships between eye movements and neural activity in the hippocampus and adjacent cortical structures, and for her discovery of grid cells in the macaque entorhinal cortex related to eye movements. Dr. Buffalo received a B.A. in Philosophy from Wellesley College, and an M.A. (Philosophy) and Ph.D. (Neurosciences) from the University of California, San Diego. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Buffalo joined the faculty at Emory University in 2005, and then moved her lab to the University of Washington in 2013, where she currently serves as the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor and Chair of Physiology and Biophysics. She is also a Core Faculty member of the Washington National Primate Research Center. Dr. Buffalo has received several awards for her research including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for her innovative, multidisciplinary study of the hippocampus and the neural basis of memory. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Megan Jutras

I began working in the Buffalo Lab in 2006 as a research technician at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, GA.  As the lab grew I worked on a variety of different projects, including evaluating monkeys’ preference for viewing faces, designing a task of contextual learning and exploring cognitive impairments in early Parkinson’s Disease in both monkeys and humans.  Over the years I have had the pleasure to work with an amazing number of talented scientists, including graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, fellow technicians, undergraduate volunteers and even a group of highly motivated high school students and teachers.  I am thrilled to continue my research career as the Buffalo Lab manager at the University of Washington Primate Center in Seattle where my love for monkeys and scientific discovery continues to grow.

Sofia Landi

Jon Rueckemann

My research investigates the hippocampal mechanisms that facilitate linking discontiguous events into a unitary sequence.  I previously researched how cortical input shapes hippocampal activity through a combination of optogenetics, pharmacology and extracellular electrophysiology in the laboratory of Howard Eichenbaum at Boston University.

Ellen Streitwieser Bakotich

Michael Jutras

AJ Mallory

Solana Fernandez

As a bioengineering alumna of the University of California, Los Angeles, I have been a part of the Buffalo Lab since late 2022. My undergraduate work involved developing biosensors for orthopaedic use, but I have since pivoted into neuroscience. I am primarily curious about characterizing complex eye movements and investigating how these behaviors evolve as a primate learns and forages within a virtual environment.

Mikko Epstein-O’Rourke

As an undergraduate in the UW neuroscience program, I joined the lab in summer 2023. I am interested in eye-tracking as a metric of memory, and the intersection of hippocampal neural networks and LLMs.