portrait of Marcus A. Banks

Marcus A. Banks


Marcus Banks is an intern at Spectrum and a 2019 graduate of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University. He has also worked at Nature Medicine and TCTMD.
Before becoming a journalist, Marcus was a health sciences librarian, most of the time in management roles. His first position was as associate fellow of the National Library of Medicine, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He has also worked at New York University, the University of California, San Francisco, and Samuel Merritt University in Oakland, California.  He has a B.A. in English from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a master’s degree in library and information science from Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

Reverse engineering neural circuits; success stories from computational neuroscience

Kevin Mitchell talks with Timothy Behrens about ring attractors, the role of innate structure, and an expanded view of cognitive maps.

By Kevin Mitchell
6 August 2026 | 60 min watch

Alison Barth discovers how different neuron types contribute to cortical function

Barth uses learning tasks in mice as a tool to drive synaptic plasticity in the sensory cortex, hoping to unlock more general principles of how the cortex works.

By Paul Middlebrooks
5 August 2026 | 1 min read
Mouse muscle cells.

Virus-like particles deliver gene-editing tools into Duchenne mouse model

The approach uses a protein found in fruit flies to ferry the gene editor Cas9 into muscle cells.

By Brianna Abbott
5 August 2026 | 5 min read