Catherine Braine (Graduate Student) was a PhD candidate in the Columbia Neurobiology and Behavior graduate program where she was co-mentored by Dr. Tom Maniatis and Dr. Hemali Phatnani. Her project sought to understand how activation of Transforming Growth Factor Beta signaling in motor neurons influences their survival and changes their interactions with neighboring glia in a mouse model of ALS. Catherine received her BA in Biological Sciences from Mount Holyoke College where her thesis work focused on how muscle degeneration caused by over-expression of mutant human APP in fruit flies could be rescued by overexpression of Parkin and Pink1. After graduating from Mount Holyoke in 2011, she joined the lab of Dr. Simon John at The Jackson Laboratory. There, she worked on several projects to understand how activation of the complement system changes retinal ganglion cell survival in a mouse model of glaucoma.