An organism adapts its behavior through brain circuitry remodeling, which results in part from experience-dependent synaptic plasticity. Traumatic life experiences, chronic stress and drugs of abuse dysregulate adaptive mechanisms, producing a variety of aberrant behaviors associated with multiple neuropsychiatric disorders, such as depression, anxiety and addiction.
Our main goal is to provide mechanistic insights into the aberrant behaviors and thereby contribute to the development of novel and effective treatments of neuropsychiatric disorders. Specifically, we seek to understand how experience modifies synapses and neural circuitry within the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system and how these changes impact reward processing, motivation, and executive function.
To examine the function of neurons, synapses and neural circuits we use cutting-edge techniques, such as in vivo multi-unit tetrode and large-scale silicon probe recordings, ex vivo patch clamp, calcium and neurotransmitter imaging with fiber photometry. We combine these approaches with optogenetics, chemogenetics, and basic pharmacology.
We employ transgenic rat models in combination with viral-genetic and molecular tools to label and manipulate specific proteins, neuron populations, and circuits. We also use common western blotting, immunohistochemistry, epifluorescent and confocal microscopy.
We model key features of addiction, depression, and other psychiatric disorders in rodents by utilizing a wide range of behavioral assays, including (but not limited to) operant self-administration, conditioned place preference, and locomotor activity. To probe the causal role of synaptic plasticity and neural circuits in psychopathology, we merge these behavioral approaches with electrophysiology, optogenetics, pharmacology, and other molecular tools described above.
We are grateful for support from the following organizations:
