Alexandra Nelson is from Berkeley, California and attended Stanford, where she learned to row, and attended the occasional class. After falling in love with ion channels, she worked in several labs and began reading Neuron cover to cover in the library. She then went to UC San Diego’s Medical Scientist Training Program, where she worked with Sascha du Lac on cellular plasticity in the vestibular system and developed a deep fondness for spontaneously firing neurons and use of purple in figures. During graduate school she found time to row for the national champions, San Diego Rowing Club.

After a Neurology residency at UCSF, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Anatol Kreitzer at the Gladstone Institute, where she studied striatal microcircuits in mouse models of movement disorders. She started her own lab and joined the UCSF Neuroscience Program in 2014 with the expert help of Ally Girasole. She continues to see patients in the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, focusing on diseases of the basal ganglia and cerebellum. She also provides medical advice to the occasional neurotic graduate student. She still lives in San Francisco with her incredibly supportive husband, wonderful daughters, and three pets. In her spare time she enjoys cooking lab snacks, running, tree and invertebrate phylogeny, and going camping with her family. She also enjoys complete sentences and fully referenced documents.