Ya’el C. Courtney, BS, is a fourth year PhD Candidate in the Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University. Prior to her PhD, Ya’el completed her BS in Cellular and Molecular Biology at Kent State University in 2019. At Kent State, she wrote an honors undergraduate thesis with Dr. Gemma Casadesus-Smith in Neuroendocrinology. She conducts her PhD thesis research in the laboratory of Dr. Maria Lehtinen in the Pathology Department at Boston Children’s Hospital. Ya’el’s research focuses on the role of the choroid plexus (ChP) in modulating cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) contents during embryonic development, and investigates the influence of ChP-released signals in CSF on neural progenitors and resulting cortical development. Ya’el has been the recipient of the Harvard Graduate Prize Fellowship, the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Gilliam Fellowship for Advanced Study.
