Audrey Drotos

Bio

Dr. Audrey Drotos is a neuroscientist specializing in auditory coding and sensory processing. Her research at Penn, in collaboration with Dr. Maria Geffen in the Perelman School of Medicine, explores how the auditory thalamus and cortex encode behaviorally relevant sound information. She uses in vivo electrophysiology, optogenetics, and machine learning to study representations of auditory information in the brain.

Dr. Drotos received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan, where she conducted research on how glutamatergic receptors shape complex sound encoding in the auditory midbrain. Her dissertation work has been published in The Journal of Physiology and Hearing Research, and she was awarded both an NIH F31 and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her doctoral studies.

Beyond the lab, Dr. Drotos has led initiatives to broaden participation in data science and computational neuroscience, including multiple years directing Girls Who Code programs in Ann Arbor. She brings to Penn a passion for mentorship and a research agenda that combines systems neuroscience with behavioral relevance and circuit-level modeling.