Cliff Kentros started at the molecular level, receiving a masters in Cell and Molecular Biology from New York University, and then worked his way up to systems neuroscience, getting his doctorate in Physiology in Bernardo Rudy’s lab at NYU, and then finally in his postdoctoral work on hippocampal place cells with Bob Muller at SUNY Downstate and Eric Kandel at Columbia University. His own lab, first at the University of Oregon and more recently at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, combines these different levels to interrogate the neural circuitry of memory. This combination is necessary to move the systems-level study of memory from a mostly observational science to an experimental one, as one cannot fully understand how a neural circuit works without being able to independently manipulate its component parts, i.e. neuronal cell types. It is impossible to target particular neuronal cell types without co-opting the genomic machinery that specifies them, which is the overall goal of the molecular side of the lab. The physiology side of the lab uses such tools to record the effects of manipulating the activity of particular cell types in memory-related brain regions, providing insight into the neural computations underlying memory. More recently the Kentros group has begun to study the role of these neuronal cell types in pathologies of memory, most notably Alzheimer’s Disease.