Dr. Rosario Moratalla received a PhD from the Complutense University in Madrid for evaluating analgesic tests for different levels of pain integration within the central nervous system. She conducted postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied the neuroanatomy of the dopamine-dependent motor circuit involved in Parkinson’s disease (PD). She then accepted a position at the Cajal Institute CSIC in Madrid where she established her own independent research lab. Dr. Moratalla’s primary interest is identifying the rules that govern motor function in the brain and determining how these rules change in PD and dyskinesia in different animal models of PD. She is interested in discovering the cause of PD by studying how aggregation of alpha-synuclein leads to dopamine cell death and identifying the neuronal circuits involved in PD symptoms — findings that could facilitate slowing or halting disease progression.