Kristina received her B.E. in Mechanical Engineering, her M.S. in Interdisciplinary Materials Science, and her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Materials Science from Vanderbilt University. During her graduate work in the Zhang lab, she developed and applied nanomaterials to study membrane-related signaling processes, focusing on new methods to study synaptic transmission using graphene and quantum dots. In 2018, Dr. Kitko was a visiting student in the Calipari lab at Vanderbilt University, where she used an array of in vivo techniques to study the role of valence during learning in rodent behavioral models. Kristina is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Synthetic Neurobiology group, interested in the neural circuits involved in complex social decision making.