Outstanding Alum: Early Career Professional
Destynie Medeiros combines her interest in the mind and memory with exceptional research skills to explore critical neurobiological issues in medical science.
Holding a PhD in neurobiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Medeiros is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Her undergraduate research focused on Alzheimer's disease progression. For her doctoral research, Medeiros studied Rett syndrome, an autism-associated neurodevelopmental disorder. During this work, she identified abnormalities that disrupt coordinated neural activity during social behavior.
As her career progresses, Medeiros aims to deepen her understanding of how the brain forms social memories, enabling individuals to recognize, remember, and respond to others; how social memories evolve throughout the lifespan; and how these processes influence behavior and mental health.
Medeiros has accumulated an impressive number of accolades for someone so early in her career—a trend that began at UHart, where she received the Elisabeth Swain Biology Award for Academic Achievement and the Belle K. Ribicoff Prize for excellence in scholarly or creative activity and service.
More recently, Medeiros founded and chairs the New York Memory Hub's Junior Executive Committee, a cross-institutional initiative dedicated to advancing memory research through dialogue, collaboration, and innovation. In 2025, she organized the New York Memory Hub Annual Conference at Mount Sinai, which convened over 200 trainees and faculty from across the neuroscience community.