Mala Murthy is a Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University and leads the Murthy Lab in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute – their work focuses on the neural mechanisms that underlie social communication, using the fruit fly Drosophila as a model system. Her work has led to the discovery that sensory feedback cues and brain internal state dynamically modulate song patterning in flies, which has opened up the study of how the brain mediates the back and forth exchange of information between individuals, leveraging the tools of the fly model system. Her team has also developed new methods for quantifying animal behavior that have been widely used in neuroscience research.