My research at northwestern with Dr. Christina Zelano focused on the human amygdala subnucleithat receive monosynaptic input from the olfactory bulb. Surprisingly little is known
about these brain regions, including their potential roles in olfactory and nonolfactory
processing. During my PhD, I completed three projects aimed at furthering our understanding...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
Background: The way in which one perceives their visual world (i.e., bottom-up visual perception) and what one pays attention to in their surroundings (i.e., top-down attention), are critical to uncovering underlying thoughts and cognitions, and impact how one operates in the social world. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a...
Herpes simplex virus (HSV) encephalitis (HSE) is the most common cause of sporadic fatal encephalitis, and despite targeted antiviral therapy, outcomes remain poor. While rare in adults, neonates are significantly more susceptible to severe HSV disease. Understanding both the host and viral factors that contribute to pathogenesis is critical to...
The retina does not act as a simple camera, rather visual information goes through multiple layers of processing before it reaches the brain. Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are the output neurons of the retina and process visual information in the retina and then project into the brain. There are over...
All animals purposefully navigate feature-rich environments: while exploring, in search of vital resources of food and water, finding mates, and patrolling and marking habitats. During these complex behaviors, continuous analogue input information from peripheral sensory organs guides discrete and digital sequential motor output; accordingly, each action is informed, modulated, or...
The cerebellar cortical system is an extensively studied circuit which is critical for motor learning. While multiple monoamines, such as norepinephrine and serotonin, modulate cerebellar cortical output, the mechanistic details of dopaminergic signaling in the cerebellum remain poorly understood. Additionally, neuronal cell types residing within the cerebellum remain relatively under-characterized....
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent primary central nervous system tumor, characterized by resistance to therapeutic intervention, inevitable recurrence, and ultimately patient death. The dismal prognosis is due in part to underlying molecular factors that promote an intratumoral cellular state heterogeneity and protect tumor cells from cell death pathways....
Numerous insights into the sensorimotor systems that guide the control of voice have been garnered by observing how the system responds to manipulations of its auditory feedback. However, current approaches may be limited in the exploration of more complex parameters of volitional and adaptive voice control due to their limited...
Sensorimotor integration is a general term to describe how task-specific motor output is generated from the selective and rapid processing of sensory and motor information. The rodent vibrissal (whisker) system is an important model for the study of sensorimotor integration and active tactile sensing. This research uses the rodent vibrissal...
Social engagement, or shared attention between a child and caregiver, is a critical process for language and social development. Although previous EEG studies have investigated child social processing in closely controlled, experimental studies, no study has examined the interactive, reciprocal process of naturalistic social engagement. In my first paper, we...
In memory overgeneralization, details from negatively-valenced episodic memories become excessively generalized to unrelated neutral situations. This is a key cognitive distortion associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stress promotes memory generalization, and this process likely relies on stress-induced changes in dorsal...
Stimulus generalization is a critical mechanism for facilitating behavioral flexibility. Generalization allows the brain to reduce computational demands that would otherwise be necessary to create unique representations for each and every encounter while allowing the ability to deal with the complexity of real-world situations. Stimulus generalization is a fundamental cognitive...
The dentate gyrus is the first region for information processing within the classic hippocampal trisynaptic circuit, and this position makes it an important structure for the formation of associative memories. The dentate gyrus contains two major types of excitatory neurons: granule cells and mossy cells. While previous work has shown...
Protein homeostasis, or proteostasis, is essential for preserving all cellular functions and involves a balance of protein synthesis, folding, trafficking, and degradation. A collapse in proteostasis is a common feature of many neurodegenerative disorders that are characterized by the accumulation of insoluble protein aggregates in the brain. Parkinson’s disease (PD)...
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor neuron (MN) degeneration and resulting in progressive paralysis and death. ALS is genetically heterogeneous, disease pathophysiology is not completely understood, and there are no effective drug therapies. To develop broadly applicable therapeutics, we examine disease mechanisms in the...
Movement is achieved by combining synaptic inputs from various sources and activating motor unit populations. Motor units are the quantal elements of motor control which act as a neuromechanical transducer that converts sensory inputs into motor output. Because of the tight neuromuscular junctions between motoneuron axon terminals and a large...
Mitochondria-lysosome contacts are recently identified sites for mediating crosstalk between both organelles, but their role in normal and diseased human neurons remains unknown. We used super-resolution and live-cell microscopy in human iPSC-derived neurons to demonstrate that mitochondria-lysosome contacts can dynamically form in the soma, axons, and dendrites of human neurons,...
Chemokines, such as Stromal Derived Factor 1 (SDF-1 or CXCL12) and their G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are well known regulators of the development and functions of numerous tissues. CXCL12 has two receptors: CXCR4 and CXCR7 or atypical chemokine receptor 3 (ACKR3). CXCR7 has been described as an atypical “biased”...
Coordinated movement relies on the precise and controlled activation of populations of motor units, which convert the commands of the nervous system into muscle forces. Motor unit firing patterns are often nonlinear and generated through the response to a combination of ionotropic excitatory and inhibitory commands, as well as metabotropic...