July 13th - FENS virtual seminar session (13:00 - 14:30 British Summer Time!)

If you are attending FENS, virtually stop in to say hello at our session, where we on focus on how to develop new therapeutic approaches to battle fearful and addictive memories.

S32 - The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind: recent advances to reduce fear and addictive memories

Bianca Silva (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne): A thalamo-amygdalar circuit underlying the extinction of remote fear memories

Kerry Ressler (Harvard Medical School): Biomarkers of Trauma Response and Recovery: Intermediate Phenotypes as Targets for Interfering with Trauma Memories?

Ekaterina Likhtik (Hunter College, CUNY): Safety training as a therapeutic tool to improve fear discrimination: translational implications.

Amy Milton (University of Cambridge): Preventing Drug Relapse by Modifying Memories: Challenges and Opportunities in Exploiting Reconsolidation to Treat Addiction.

New pre-print out on BioRxiv

Salient Safety Conditioning Improves Novel Discrimination Learning.

Overgeneralized fear is a prevalent symptom in disorders of anxiety, and we are interested in finding therapeutic approaches to increase discrimination of non-threat in high-anxiety populations. We show that high anxiety mice (that also typically have high overgeneralized fear, like humans), improve in learning outcomes and discriminate non-threatening stimuli better after we train them on salient safety cues. It’s possible that our salient safety paradigm, trains the same networks as will later be active during non-threatening stimuli.

Great teamwork by Itzik and Jenny in the lab!

Does Wikipedia do a good job covering the work that women do in STEM?

In their blog piece, Rebecca Zhang from the lab and Mackenzie Lemieux from Kay Tye’s lab (Salk Institute) highlight how building Wikipedia pages for women in STEM is a game changer for disseminating the scientific accomplishments of women working in science. The recognition has a myriad benefits, including helping prospective graduate students, like Rebecca, find out about potential mentors and pinpoint suitable graduate programs that might never be discovered otherwise.

Take a read!

Talk at the Advanced Science Research Center

Looking forward to sharing our work at the ASRC Lunch & Learn online seminar series on Thursday, June 4th from 12:00 - 1:30.

I will be discussing “Novel pathways of fear suppression learning”.

email el1417 at hunter dot cuny dot edu if you are interesting in attending.

Congratulations to Rebecca on winning the Fulbright Scholarship!

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In the fall, Rebecca will be heading off to Germany to work with Nadine Gogolla at the Max Plank Institute of Neurobiology to study the insular cortex. In the lab Rebecca has been working on the pathways linking the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and the basal forebrain in emotion regulation, which is a perfect segue for this next stage in her research career. Awesome job!

Lab keychains that Rebecca designed and 3D printed for the lab.

Response to COVID19

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Our lab PPE went out to medical staff in NYC, and we are 3D printing face shields that are going out to hospitals in NY, NJ, and PA. Special thanks to Rebecca for optimizing the design for our printer, to allow for scaling up our face shield production! We are printing a modified version of the original design by Carbon, which works with our Form2 Formlabs printer (Draft or Tough resin).

There are a variety of online communities focused on 3D printing PPE, including NYC Makes PPE, and FormLabs.

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Congratulations to Carolina and Becky!

Congratulations to Carolina on winning the Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship for the Sciences and to Becky on winning the NIH Outstanding Scholars in Neuroscience Award Program - OSNAP!

Fantastic to see students get recognition for their hard work!

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Monday 3/2 Biology Seminar

Development and evolution of the neural crest in vertebrates.

Maria Elena de Bellar (Califonia State University, Northridge)

Monday, March 2nd, 12-1pm

Rm. 926, Hunter North

Friday 2/21 CNC Seminar: Peter Balsam

‘To go or not to go - Is that the question? The many faces of dopamine in learning and motivation.”

Peter Balsam (Barnard College - Columbia University)

Friday, February 21st, 10-11:30

The Graduate Center, Room 6496

Fifth Ave. and 34th Street

Friday, 12/6, Presenting our work @ SUNY Albany

I’m looking forward to sharing our work on circuit communication during fear suppression at SUNY Albany, where I will tie together our older and newer work on this topic. We look at circuit communication in fear suppression during discrimination of a non-threatening cue, extinction of a threatening cue, and safety learning in order to have a thorough understanding of neural processing in emotion regulation.