Carina Curto facts for kids

Carina Curto (born April 15, 1978) is an American mathematician and a professor at Pennsylvania State University. She is known for her important work in mathematical neuroscience. This field uses math to understand how the brain works.

Professor Curto studies how different parts of the brain connect and communicate. Her research helps us learn more about brain activity and how it changes. She has received special awards, like the Sloan Research Fellowship, for her contributions to science.

Early Life and School

Carina Curto grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. Her parents were from Argentina. She went to Iowa City West High School. Even in high school, she took advanced classes at the University of Iowa. These included advanced mathematics, physics, and computer science.

In 1996, she started studying physics at Harvard University. While at Harvard, she won several awards, including the Detur Book Prize. After graduating from Harvard in 2000, she received a special scholarship called the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This helped her go to Duke University for her Ph.D. in mathematics. Her Ph.D. research focused on complex math topics like string theory and algebraic geometry.

Career and Brain Research

After earning her Ph.D., Dr. Curto moved to Rutgers University. There, she worked in a neuroscience lab. She then decided to focus more on using mathematics to study the brain. She worked at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, then at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and finally at Pennsylvania State University.

Today, she is a mathematics professor at Penn State. She also helps lead their mathematical neuroscience lab. She is part of the Center for Neural Engineering, where engineers and scientists work together to understand the brain.

How Brain Networks Connect

Dr. Curto's research looks at how brain cells, called neurons, connect and interact. She studies patterns in brain activity. This helps her understand how different parts of the brain work together.

Traditionally, scientists used tools from physics to study the brain. But Dr. Curto uses tools from pure mathematics, especially algebraic geometry. She applies these math tools to real brain activity data. Her work is very important in a field called connectomics. This field maps out all the connections in the brain.

For example, her research has shown that even small changes in brain networks can greatly change how the brain works. This could help us understand brain disorders like Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.

Dr. Curto also works with Katherine Morrison from the University of Northern Colorado. They are creating special math models called Combinatorial Threshold-Linear Networks (CTLNs). These models help them see patterns in brain activity. They can even predict how brain activity might change in the future. This is usually very hard to do.

Network Songs

Dr. Curto and Katherine Morrison also created a fun project called Network Songs. This project turns the rhythmic activity of brain networks into music! They assign a note on a piano to each neuron. Then, as the neurons become active, they play their notes.

Dr. Curto explains that sometimes, our ears can hear patterns better than our eyes can see them. So, listening to the "songs" of brain activity can help scientists understand the data in a new way.

Awards and Personal Life

Carina Curto has received many awards and grants. She was a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow and an Alfred Sloan Research Fellow. In 2012, she was named a UNL Academic Star at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2021, she became a Simons Fellow in Mathematics.

In March 2018, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) honored Dr. Curto. They included her in a list of 27 female mathematicians for Women's History Month. They also published a story about her in their journal, Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Dr. Curto cares about encouraging women in mathematics. She has been involved with the Women In Math club at UNL. She also helped organize the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM).

Outside of her work, Carina Curto is an amateur tennis player. In high school, she was the Double State Champion in 1995. She also played varsity tennis for Harvard in 1996-1997.

She lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with her husband and two children.