Dr. Dunaevsky is a professor in the Department of Neurological Sciences in the University of Nebraska Medical Center and the Director of Cognitive Neuroscience of Development and Aging COBRE. She received her B.S and M.A from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her PhD from University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She trained as a postdoctoral associate in the laboratories of Drs. Carol Mason and Rafael Yuste at Columbia University. Her lab studies how developmental defects in synaptic and glial function in the cerebral cortex result in symptoms of autism and intellectual dysfunction. Specifically, they study impairments in motor learning, sensory hypersensitivity and sleep in mouse models of fragile X syndrome by combining in vivo two-photon calcium imaging, electrophysiology and behavior. They also examine the function of neural cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells from FXS patients, to validate findings from the mouse models.