Mark Beenhakker

Mark Beenhakker is an Associate Professor of Pharmacology and the director of UVA’s Neuroscience Graduate Program. During his PhD work, Mark worked on invertebrate neural circuits with Mikey Nusbaum at Penn. After receiving his PhD, Mark worked on mammalian neural circuits with John Huguenard at Stanford.

The Beenhakker lab aims to understand how the brain generates complex electrical signals, and how these signals are used to process information. A major extension of this aim is to understand why electrical activity in the brain becomes uncontrollable during certain diseases such as epilepsy. The lab uses electrophysiological, anatomical and computational approaches to resolve answers to these questions.