Mission
Our mission is to make significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders like Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) and anxiety.
We aim to do so by
Mission
Our mission is to make significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders like Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) and anxiety.
We aim to do so by
- being creative, innovative and collaborative in our conceptual and technical approaches,
- conducting and communicating our research with integrity and clarity, and
- providing a vibrant and nurturing training environment for the next generation of neuroscientists.
Vision
Our research seeks to understand how environmental cues that come to be perceived as either positive or negative, influence the nervous system, physiology, and reproductive biology of generations that have been directly exposed to such cues. Complementary to such investigation is our desire to query how such influences on ancestral biology affect descendant generations.
In so doing, we aim to contribute toward a scientific understanding of the biology underlying complex neuropsychiatric disorders like Post Traumatic Stress (PTS), phobias and anxiety. Armed with this understanding, we envision designing and devising clinically relevant therapeutic interventions to ameliorate the detrimental effects of such disorders.
Approach
Using the framework provided by classical fear conditioning, we investigate how the biology of an organism and its responsiveness to salient environmental stimuli is influenced by its micro- (genome, epigenome, cellular niches, hormones) and macro-environments (parental experiences that occur prior to conception, in utero and post-natal experiences).
Informing these approaches are our past, and current experiences with a variety of model systems (rats, lizards, fruit-flies, mice) and scientific disciplines (stress neurobiology, endocrinology, neurogenetics, epigenetics, physiology, innate & learned behavioral repertoires).
While most of our studies use mice, in the future, we are also investigating the biological basis of behavioral states and neuropsychiatric disorders by pursuing collaborations that involve the study of non-human primates, and humans.
