Zoé Christenson Wick

Zoé Christenson Wick is a neuroscientist seeking to develop effective, scalable interventions for treating cognitive decline during aging and in epilepsy. The Christenson Wick lab investigates how neural synchrony shapes our cognitive experience, and uses innovative real-time, brain-inspired manipulations to determine how changes in neural synchrony causally drive cognitive dysfunction in aging and epilepsy. The research performed in the Christenson Wick lab aims to inform and push the boundaries of how we use and design neuromodulation strategies to treat disease in the clinic. 

Before opening her lab, Christenson Wick completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Tristan Shuman in the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NYC. There, she developed PhaSER – an open source tool which allows simultaneous manipulation and monitoring of single-neuron spiking relative to the brain’s ongoing oscillations. She applied this tool to epilepsy and discovered that small shifts in the timing of inhibitory neuron spiking could bidirectionally influence seizure susceptibility. In support of this work, she was awarded the Friedman Brain Institute Postdoc Innovator Award, American Epilepsy Society Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain Transition to Independence Award. Prior to her time in NYC, she earned her PhD in Neuroscience in the lab of Esther Krook-Magnuson at the University of Minnesota, where she discovered a previously uncharacterized inhibitory neuron population and studied the influence of long-range inhibition in the healthy and epileptic hippocampus. 
   
Note: Zoé Christenson Wick opened her lab in September 2026. Reach out by email if you’re interested in joining the team as an undergraduate, graduate student, postdoc, or research staff member.