Academic interests
My long-term goal is to understand the neural circuitry of innate defensive behaviors. Innate behaviors are robust, hard wired, and simple enough that defining all the cell types essential to behavior is a tractable problem. At the same time, they are shaped by a range of environmental inputs and can therefore be used to study how external conditions impact circuit properties.
Studying even simple neural circuits quickly becomes an intractable task because the mammalian brain has an astounding diversity of cell types, each produced by evolution to contribute in its own unique way to the processing and transmission of information. Precisely how each cell type contributes to a given process remains unclear due to practical constraints on restricting mechanistic studies to single cell types.
My research focuses on developing and implementing tools to study neural circuits at the single cell level, within the context of innate defensive behaviors.
Courses taught
- Avansert fysiologi og nervobiologi https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ibv/BIOS5812/
Background
Dr. Hazen completed her PhD in Cell Biology from the Department of Neuroscience, Scripps Research Institute, USA. She was a post-doc at Scripps from 2014-2016, and a post-doc at CINPLA at the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo.
She has several publications in high impact journals, including Nature, Neuron, Cell Stem, Nature Methods, Nature Protocols. She has experience in mentoring student researchers, and a strong history of collaborations with other laboratories.
Awards
- Recipient of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the most prestigious USA undergraduate scholarship awarded in the natural sciences, engineering and mathematics.