Dr. Hanson received her undergraduate degree from Colgate University where she played Division I varsity women’s basketball and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Molecular Biology. She then completed her MD/PhD training at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine where she studied the mechanism of Wnt signal transduction in the laboratory of Dr. Ethan Lee in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. Her thesis work resulted in a first-author publication in Molecular Cell and has been presented at numerous national and international meetings. During her graduate training, she also spent two years studying classical oil painting and drawing in the studio of Anthony Ryder in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now a resident in psychiatry, Dr. Hanson has joined the laboratory of Dr. Rafael Yuste at Columbia University where she is studying one of the earliest nervous systems in evolution; the nerve net of the cnidarian Hydra vulgaris.
