My students and I use behavioral pharmacology and immunohistochemistry in an attempt to answer questions related to two main lines of research: the neuropharmacology of drug abuse and heavy metal neurotoxicity. As shown in the photos on this page, we regularly present the results of our work at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Meeting and the NEURON conference. Some of the projects we have been working on are outlined below. It is important to note that I do not limit my students to projects centered on my research interests. I view student-directed research as a symbiotic opportunity to explore new and interesting areas that allow me to further my scholarship while providing valuable experience for the next generation of scientists. When students are personally involved in the development of their intellectual and empirical skills through hands-on experience from the idea stage through the publication of findings, they take ownership of their work. Many students have approached me with ideas outside of my research interests that they would like to explore. If the projects are reasonable and within the resources and facilities we have, we are often able to devise a meaningful and legitimate project that can be accomplished within a limited time frame.

Bill Hall houses the college’s only laboratory animal facility capable of housing approximately 100 rats. The neuroscience labs at Connecticut College are equipped with a variety of behavioral testing apparatuses. There are conditioned place preference chambers and activity monitors for measuring the rewarding and locomotor effects of drugs of abuse. There is a Barnes maze, a radial arm maze and novel object recognition chambers for examining learning and memory. There is an elevated plus maze and a large open field chamber for measuring anxiety-like behavior. We also have tail-flick monitors for analgesia experiments and stereotaxic frames for rodent intracranial canula placement. We also have a well-equipped tissue processing lab where students can learn to cryosection brain tissue and perform a variety of histochemical and immunohistochemical procedures that allow for the microscopic evaluation of tissue differentiation and protein expression.

The role of the glutamate transporter in drug addiction

For more than a decade, my students and I have been investigating the role of the glutamate system in drug addiction. This line of research has been a fruitful collaboration with Dr. Scott Rawls’ lab at Temple University School of Medicine. Glutamate transporters (GLT-1) are critical for maintaining the extracellular concentration of glutamate below toxic levels in the central nervous system. Chronic exposure to many drugs of abuse dysregulates cellular glutamate uptake and signaling in the nucleus accumbens. Therefore, drugs that target glial GLT-1 to reverse the glutamate dysregulation that contributes to addictive and relapse behaviors may be potentially useful as anti-addiction medications. We have been investigating the efficacy of compounds aimed at the GLT-1 that lower glutamate levels for their effectiveness in attenuating reward and relapse-related behaviors in pre-clinical rodent models of addiction. These drugs include the β-lactam antibiotic ceftriaxone, the β-lactamase inhibitor clavulanic acid, troriluzole, a prodrug of the ALS drug riluzole that enhances cellular glutamate uptake and inhibits neuronal glutamate release, and NA-014 which directly activates GLT-1 through selective allosteric modulation after a single exposure. This line of research has resulted in three peer-reviewed publications with two manuscripts in progress along with nine conference abstracts.

The effects of environmental enrichment/impoverishment on learning deficits resulting from early developmental lead exposure.

In 2013 I traveled with a group of faculty to La Oroya, Peru as part of the grant funded Global Environmental Justice Project. One outcome of the project was an ongoing line of research in which several teams of students and I have examined the effects of early developmental lead exposure on learning and memory. One thing we realized relatively early was that inducing learning deficits in rats based on lead exposure was more difficult than we anticipated. We have used multiple concentrations of food and water-based lead administration in a combination of in utero, pre- and post-weaning exposures to produce only mild or inconsistent deficits. We later realized that the combination of early lead exposure with post-weaning environmental impoverishment in the form of social isolation produced a much more profound deficit. Conversely, post-weaning environmental enrichment completely eliminates the effects of lead. The data hints at the resiliency with which the brain reacts to insults and emphasizes the need to model environmental factors when examining lead toxicity. This line of research has resulted in five conference presentations and was the topic of two student honors theses. Equally as important, the research has provided rich and meaningful content for the students in my first-year seminar over the years. We are currently fine tuning our methodology by using a newly acquired Barnes maze to more intricately examine the nature of lead/impoverishment-induced deficits.

The relationship between college student sleep patterns, stress, and lifestyle behaviors.

In my PSY204 Psychology of Sleep course, students contribute to an anonymized, class-wide data set by tracking their sleep and reporting personal data on stress, exercise, screen use, calorie/caffeine/alcohol consumption, study time, etc. to learn how their personal sleep habits compare to the class’s and how to improve them. In 2020, I realized that the COVID-19 pandemic provided an ideal opportunity to examine the effects of social isolation, remote learning, and other COVID-related stressors on college student sleep, stress, and lifestyle behaviors. I taught the course over Zoom in the fall of 2020 collecting data from both on-campus and remote learners and again in the spring of 2022 when everyone was in-person but subject to masking and social distancing. With the help of a student, I analyzed the data from the spring 2018, fall 2020, and spring 2022 courses and wrote a manuscript that is currently under review for publication in The Journal of American College Health. We found that self-reported stress did not change from pre- to mid-pandemic while sleep quality and several other sleep parameters improved. Along with several other interesting changes in lifestyle behavior, we suggested that remote learning and social distancing provided a more conducive student sleep environment compared to the traditional, non-ideal dormitory environment. The pandemic restrictions also enabled students to devote more time to sleep health. The end result was better sleep quality which may have counteracted the added stress of the pandemic and afforded students the resiliency to respond to changes in their lives and learning. This brand-new line of research and the SleepScore methodology we have established opens a wide range of potential research questions relating to college student sleep health. It is my intention to provide this methodology to psychology and neuroscience students who wish to explore sleep health related questions for their own projects.

High fat/high sugar food reward and addiction

In 2012, Jamie Honohan, a Behavioral Neuroscience major and Holleran Center PICA scholar approached me with an idea to explore her interest in the food addiction hypothesis. She convinced me to allow her to see if rats could develop condition place preference to Oreo cookies. I tried to talk her into using high fat/high sugar rat chow but she was insistent on using Oreos. Not only did she find that rats conditioned to Oreos, but when we measured c-Fos expression in the nucleus accumbens, we found that the expression levels surpassed that of cocaine- and morphine-addicted animals. Jamie graduated and the project was picked up by summer student Lauren Cameron who presented the results of our project at an on-campus symposium. The uniqueness of her project caught the attention of College Relations who wrote a story for the college’s web page about the project. The story was then picked up by the local news station and we were interviewed for a story on the 5:00 news which went viral with dozens of news outlets including ABCnews, WNPR, The Atlantic picking up the story. Recently, a few students have expressed interest in the food addiction hypothesis and I am collaborating with my colleague Shane Perrine and his students at Wayne State University who have shown that rats can be sensitized to the reinforcing value of Oreos with similar patterns of c-Fos expression in brain reward regions. A manuscript on this project is currently underway.