Rachel Wilson (neurobiologist)

Education and early career

Wilson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She received an A.B. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco in 2001, where she worked in the laboratory of Roger Nicoll. There, she searched for the molecule in the brain that enabled neurons to communicate in reverse—known as retrograde signaling—across synapses. She discovered that endocannabinoids—which mimic the active ingredient in marijuana and naturally exist in the brain—were responsible for allowing post-synaptic neurons to communicate to their pre-synaptic counterparts.

Following her Ph.D., Wilson became a postdoctoral researcher at California Institute of Technology, working in the laboratory of Gilles Laurent. There, she began working on Drosophila (fruit flies) as a model organism, seeking to understand how neurons integrate information from their surroundings. She recorded electrical signals in the brain of these flies to understand how those signals corresponded to specific odors as stimuli.