Dr. David Exposito-Alonso, PhD, is a neuroscientist at Boston Children’s Hospital. As a Postdoctoral Researcher in the laboratory of Prof. Christopher Walsh (Division of Genetics and Genomics), he is studying the functional impact of genetic mutations associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is formed by a wide diversity of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, whose proper connectivity is fundamental for high-order cognitive functions such as attention, memory, and sensory processing. David’s research is aimed at understanding how the assembly and function of cortical circuits might be affected by genetic risk factors during brain development. David received his PhD degree in Developmental Neurobiology from King’s College London, UK, under the joint supervision of Prof. Oscar Marin and Prof. Beatriz Rico in 2021. His doctoral work identified several genetic programs involved in the formation of specific types of synaptic connections in the cerebral cortex and were published in journals such as eLife, Science, and PNAS. He obtained a MSc degree in Neurosciences from the University of Barcelona in 2015, where he trained in the laboratory of Prof. Eduardo Soriano and performed ultrastructural electron microscopy studies to investigate the development and maturation of synaptic connections in developing and adult neurons of the cerebral cortex.