In Professor Birren's Developmental Neurobiology laboratory, undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers work together to gain a new understanding of how cellular interactions control the development of nerve cells and functional neural circuits. Her work has defined the reciprocal signaling between the nervous system and the heart that leads to neural control of cardiac function and to cardiovascular disease. She received her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from the University of California at Los Angeles and did post-doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology in the area of Development Neurobiology. She has been a member of the Brandeis faculty since 1994 and is a member of the Brandeis National Center for Behavioral Genomics and the Volen Center for Complex Systems.