Leena Ali Ibrahim earned her B.Sc. in Biomedical Science from Delhi University and her M.Sc. in Life Sciences from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She then moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Southern California (USC). During her time at USC, she worked in Dr. Huizhong Tao’s lab, contributing to several projects. Her work included developing a Cre-dependent reporter mouse lines for tracing single-neuron projections, as well as utilizing patch-clamping and 2-photon imaging to explore the influence of cross-modal inputs on visual cortical processing. Following her Ph.D., Leena joined Dr. Gord Fishell’s lab at Harvard Medical School (HMS) as a Postdoctoral Researcher, where she focused on the connectivity of layer 1 interneurons in the sensory cortex. In August 2021, she established her own independent lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Returning to the Middle East allowed her to be closer to her family while benefiting from the advanced research infrastructure at KAUST, enabling her to continue her investigations into the complexities of cortical sensory processing and its disruptions in neuropsychiatric and developmental disorders.