Research: NeuRoscience

Stress is inescapable in modern era lifestyles. However, stress can also be pathological, worsened by life events, trauma or threat. Post Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating concern in post war veterans, survivors of domestic violence, as well as refugees, survivors of political violence, or natural disasters. The disease has both personal and public costs involved. Therapy and medications have both met with limited success. The mechanisms through which how the brain reacts to chronic stressors is just starting to be understood. My research in this arm has few distinct sub-projects.

1. Developing good chronic stress paradigms in rodents, both physical and psychosocial, that leads to persistent changes in their anxious, depressive behaviors and fear extinction. The goal is to develop a reliable model that captures all these aspects together, modeling parts of PTSD symptomatology.

2. Study post stress mechanisms long and short term, with neural correlates as well as neuro inflammatory correlates. We also want to focus on neuron-glial interaction in this regard.

3. We see a distinct gender difference in the severity of symptoms and biochemical changes in the brain in females. This is in line with the observation that most stress and anxiety related disorders are almost twice as prevalent in females as males per clinical data. We also want to understand how age plays into such differences, in terms of post acute and chronic stress.

In our work, we use rodent colony management, rodent handling, various behavioral tasks in rodents related to social learning, vicarious conditioning, classical conditioning, spatial learning, as well as fear learning. We perform standard and non standard perfsuion techniques, dissection of whole brain, or specific areas of the brain, prepare them for either immunohisochemistry or molecular biology. At the bench, we employ various immunohistological techniques and standard molecular biology techniques such as gel electrophoresis, western blot, ELISA or enzymatic assays. We analyze our immunohistology data with both light and fluorescence microscopy. Confocal microscopy and method development for quantitative data analysis is one of the other thrusts in research in this project.