Kasia Bieszczad, PhD

Associate Professor Principal Investigator & Director

Our research focuses on the neurobiological substrates of learning and memory. We are particularly interested in how the brain processes and stores specific content in long-term memory. Animals (like humans) are capable of learning detailed information about sensory cues that are important because of their association with significant events. Associative learning makes memory rich with sensory information. What are the neural substrates of information-rich memory? What is the basis of individual differences in remembering an event with high stimulus specificity versus stimulus generalization? The lab investigates these questions with experiments that aim to understand the transformation of transient sensory experience into long-lasting memory of experience in an auditory model of associative learning. We use electrophysiological techniques to study learning-induced plasticity in the auditory cortex, as well as pharmacological techniques to identify circuit and molecular mechanisms that regulate the sound-specificity of auditory system plasticity that remodels cortical and subcortical representations of sound. Techniques used combine multiple levels of analysis: behavioral, electrophysiological, molecular, genetic; to describe brain-behavior relationships that can identify the key neural systems, circuits and epigenetic control molecules that enable specific memory to form over a lifetime of experiences.

This research is relevant for basic understanding of learning and memory processes, the auditory system as a basis for listening and communication, and for understanding the neurobiological basis for the learned significance of cues that direct adaptive (as in recall for memory) or maladaptive (as in addiction or perseverative) behaviors.

Dr. Kasia Bieszczad with Rutgers President Dr. John Holloway at a celebration for faculty excellence in May 2022.

Illustration by Sooraz Bylipudi, Alumnus of the CLEF Lab 2019 #TWENTYSIXFACESOF : 14/26 // Kasia Bieszczad

Written by Sooraz Bylipudi, September 2020

"The primary auditory cortex, where what you hear is primarily processed in the brain, is like a magical piano keyboard. It’s organized with low tones on one end and high tones on the other, much like a piano. But, on this piano, when you “play” a key often or when the tone of that key represents something important to you, the area of the key expands. Keys that aren’t “played” as often or that represent tones that aren’t as important to you shrink their key areas. In the brain, the key areas— the representational area of our brains for these tones— change to better reflect our necessity to recognize these tones in our environment.

I remember wading clumsily through this metaphor while practicing a presentation for the first time to the members of CLEF lab— including the professor I was researching under, Dr. Kasia Bieszczad. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I remain super proud of it. In the tides of new information in which I was trying to stay afloat, I loved finding these metaphorical life rafts through, well, metaphor. They served to tether me to something tangible; to compare and contrast against for a deeper understanding of both ideas. In the dark of the not yet known, they helped shine a light.

And there’s a lot that is not yet known. With the help of the supportive, knowledgeable, and all-around amazing members that were a part of the lab over the 3 years I was there, we performed experiments, collected data, and talked about findings over Panera bagels and coffee. Even when tackling such a seemingly specific question like how the inhibition of a specific protein affects learning and auditory memory in a specific animal model, so many avenues open up for future questioning. In pursuing those questions, even more came up. Ironically, I’m reassured in that ever-expanding web of questions by the idea that there’s always a more complex picture than what’s initially let on—in the sciences and humanities. There’s always more, and the excitement is in making sense of it. It was a universe revealed by a microscope. Piano harmonies revealed by the sound of a single key. Not a perfect metaphor, but I’m proud of it." ~S.B.