Learning • Basal Ganglia • Birdsong • Neuroethology
I use birdsong to connect synaptic and circuit mechanisms of learning with molecular signaling, behavior, and computation.
On the faculty job market 2026-27!
Email: drew (dot) schreiner (at) duke (dot) edu
How does experience become lasting skill?
Our clearest molecules-to-behavior accounts of learning come from simple behaviors that can be traced to identified circuits and synapses. My goal is to bring that same mechanistic resolution to complex, culturally transmitted skills like speech and music.
Birdsong makes this possible. Juvenile songbirds learn complex vocal sequences through imitation and prolonged practice, using a dedicated cortico-basal ganglia circuit that sharply constrains where to look for the mechanisms of learning.
The same features that make birdsong powerful also create experimental challenges: the sheer abundance (~100,000 renditions) and richness of song make learning difficult to quantify, while birdsong's dedicated neural circuitry is difficult to target with tools developed primarily for mammals.
I overcame both barriers by combining AI-based quantification of song learning with optogenetic, chemogenetic, and biosensor tools adapted to the songbird, gaining direct access to the circuits and signaling pathways that drive learning.
Nature Communications · 2022
I showed that mice use a rich history of recent experience - above and beyond just prior actions and rewards - to guide self-generated actions, and that this information is represented in and controlled by premotor cortico-basal ganglia circuits.
Nature · 2025
We showed that dopamine in the song basal ganglia tracks the quality of individual vocal renditions and is required for juvenile song learning, and uncovered local cholinergic control of dopamine release during singing.
Nature · 2026
I identified the specific cortico-basal ganglia pathway required to express recently acquired vocal changes and showed that this dependence lasts only a few hours before the changes consolidate downstream. In the same study, artificially increasing basal ganglia activity accelerated learning at a cost to copying fidelity.
By localizing where learning happens and identifying an instructive signal that drives it, I have begun to bring the kind of mechanistic resolution that made simple learning systems so powerful to the study of a complex learned skill, with key parallels to speech and music. My independent lab will build on this foundation to develop a molecules-to-behavior account of birdsong learning through three linked questions:
01 · Acquisition
I will determine how delayed evaluation is linked to the neural activity that produced each action, revealing how moment-to-moment experience drives behavioral change.
02 · Consolidation
I will determine where and how rapid learning is transferred into downstream motor circuits.
03 · Optimization
I will determine how biological constraints tune the balance between learning speed, copying fidelity, and behavioral variation.
Together, these projects will identify the molecular, circuit, and computational mechanisms that allow one animal to learn from another - a core capacity underlying cultural transmission across individuals and generations.
May 2026 — First author paper A synaptic locus of song learning published in Nature
Oct. 2026 — P-SPINE Philadelphia Neuroscience Postdoc Seminar. UPenn, Jefferson, Drexel, and Temple
Oct. 2026 — NEURO-ROOT seminar, University of Iowa, Neuroscience and Pharmacology
July 2026 — Invited Seminar, University of Colorado Anschutz, Pharmacology
June 2026 — Neural Mechanisms of Acoustic Communication Gordon Conference Presentation
April 2026 — Invited Seminar, Mount Sinai, Neuroscience
March 2026 — Invited Seminar, Vanderbilt University, Pharmacology