Fishman Lab

Mark C. Fishman studies the social behavior of zebrafish, focusing on the genetic, neuronal, and developmental aspects of group behavior.

I received my Ph.D in Molecular Biology from the Max Planck Institute in Germany. I was then a research fellow at the Firc Institute of Molecular Oncology in Italy and then completed my post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Len Zon at Harvard, working on melanoma using zebrafish as model system. Currently, I am staff scientist in the Fishman Lab at HSCRB, and I am particularly interested in modeling social behavior in zebrafish using genome editing techniques.

I received my Ph.D in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Harvard University, where I worked on identifying genetic variation that underlie metabolic variation among distinct populations.  I’m currently a post-doc in Mark Fishman’s lab working to identify genes that control emergent behaviors and to characterize the neural circuits that are modulated in response to genetic variation.

I am a postdoc in the lab of Florian Engert at Harvard University and generally interested in how nervous systems compute and control behavior. In my work, I seek to understand the neural basis of perceptual decision-making, using the larval zebrafish as a model. Through a combination of behavioral experiments, calcium imaging, anatomical analyses, and computational modeling, I hope to unravel some general principles of the behavior that can also be tested in other animal models.