Karen Zito is a Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior in the Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis. Research in her lab focuses on elucidating the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive the changes in neuronal structure and function that support learning, and how they are altered associated with disease. She is a recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, an NSF CAREER Award, NARSAD Investigator Awards, R01 and U01 grant awards from the NIH, she was selected as a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow, and she was elected AAAS Fellow in 2021. She received her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley and she was a postdoctoral fellow in Neuroscience at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.