Kimberly Thompson serves as the vice president of research at MapLight Therapeutics, where she oversees the preclinical research and development programs with a focus on psychiatry and CNS disorders. MapLight’s drug discovery platform combines optogenetics and STARmap single-cell transcriptomics to provide unique insights into dysfunctional brain circuits that underlie specific disease symptoms. She was previously the senior director of drug discovery at Circuit Therapeutics.

She received her doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. During her graduate work with Dr. Kelsey Martin she was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and studied synapse-to-nucleus signaling underlying transcription-dependent forms of neuronal plasticity. She joined Dr. Karl Deisseroth’s lab at Stanford University for her postdoctoral training. As a NARSAD Young Investigator, Dr. Thompson expressed channelrhodopsin under the control of the activity-dependent c-fos promoter to achieve experience-dependent control over appetitive and aversive prefrontal cortical circuits.