New CELL Faculty Member Profile – Mark Cembrowski
Dr. Cembrowski grew up in Edmonton where he learned circus tricks and acrobatics before he came to Vancouver to complete his BSc in mathematics at UBC with Rachel Kuske looking at the oscillatory behaviour of sixth-order nonlinear partial differential equations. He then did his MS and PhD degrees in applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Chicago where he used computational modeling and patch-clamping to study retinal processing. His post-doc years were spent at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia working with Nelson Spruston. It was during this time that he began to combine numerous approaches that include modeling, big data analysis, transcriptomics, electrophysiology, viral circuit mapping and animal behaviour to study the roles that different cell types play in learning and memory. Today, he is expanding on this work in his own lab located in the Life Sciences Institute on the UBC campus where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences and an investigator of the Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. At the moment Mark lives on South Campus with his partner Shannon and their two daughters Lilia and Rosalind.
