Congratulations to Jared Luchetta for successfully defending his PhD thesis! Jared’s work uncovered how chemokine signaling through the CXCL12/CXCR4 pathway controls neuronal activity, and he identified that CXCR4 expressed on cortical inhibitory neurons is a major driver of CXCL12’s beneficial and homeostatic effects. Jared was a T32 fellow of Drexel’s Interdisciplinary and Translational Research Training Grant in NeuroAIDS, and he was recognized by several awards including the department’s top award for scholarship, the Benjamin Weiss Scholar Award, and the Mary Hoffman Shaw Travel Award. He was also involved in several other projects in the lab and helped other lab members move projects forward and develop new approaches to address longstanding research questions.