Congratulations to Vanessa Puñal who is the recipient of an NIH Institutional Research and Career Development Award (IRACDA) Postdoctoral training grant through University of Michigan. The Michigan IRACDA program is one of several NIH supported programs that trains postdoctoral fellows for academic research and teaching careers. The goals of the program are to enhance research skills by providing mentored research experiences while developing teaching skills through assignments that promote the advancement of under-represented minorities. For her postdoctoral research, Vanessa will be joining the lab of Josie Clowney. There she will study neural circuit development, in particular the production of sparse connectivity for associative learning.