Ivan Linares is a third year Neuroscience graduate student in the Margolis Lab at Rutgers University. He received his B.S. in Biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) where he investigated biodiversity and behavioral neuroscience. He earned his Biology Master's degree in Dr. Fatuel Tecuapetla’s Lab in the Molecular Neuropathology department of the Cellular Physiology Institute at UNAM. During his Masters, by using single-cells in vivo recordings and optogenetic techniques, he investigated how neural striatal pathways modulate in the transition between sequences of actions. Recently, he has created a novel auditory discrimination task to interrogate how the posterior striatum transforms meaningless sounds into action-related cues.