A.B., Harvard University, 1978; Ph.D., Rockefeller University, 1983. Assistant Professor, Caltech, 1986-92; Associate Professor, 1992-96; Professor, 1996-2004; Roger W. Sperry Professor, 2004-09; Benzer Professor, 2009-; Chen Institute for Neuroscience Leadership Chair, 2017-; HHMI Investigator, 1989-; Director, 2017-.

Genetic dissection of neural circuits controlling emotional behaviors Director, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience The Neurobiology of Emotional Behavior Research interests in my laboratory focus on understanding how emotional behavior is encoded in the brain, at the level of specific neuronal circuits, and the specific neuronal subtypes that comprise them. We want to understand the structure and dynamic properties of these circuits and how they give rise to the outward behavioral expressions of emotions such as fear, anxiety or anger. This information will provide a framework for understanding how and where in the brain emotions are influenced by genetic variation and environmental influence ("nature" and "nurture"), and may someday lead to improved drugs to treat psychiatric disorders such as depression. We are using both mice and the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster as model systems. A central focus of the laboratory is on the neural circuits underlying aggression and fear. We are using molecular genetic tools, as well as functional imaging and electrophysiology, to establish cause-and-effect relationships between the activity of specific neuronal circuits and behavior. We hope that this research will lead to new insights into the organization of emotion circuits, and their dysregulation in psychiatric disorders. Emotion circuits in the mouse brain Research using the laboratory mouse Mus musculus focuses on understanding the neurobiology of fear, anxiety and aggression, and the interrelationships between the circuitry that processes these emotions. Neurobiology of fear and anxiety Our studies of fear are currently centered on the function of circuits in the amygdala, a medial temporal lobe structure that plays an important role in Pavlovian learned fear, a form of classical conditioning. We have identified genes that mark several subpopulations of neurons that form a dynamic microcircuit within the central nucleus of the amygdala (Haubensak et al., 2010). The function of this microcircuit in fear behavior is being dissected using optogenetic tools, such as channelrhodopsin, and pharmacogenetic tools, such as the ivermectin-gated glutamate sensitive chloride channel (GluCl) (Lerchner et al. 2007), together with acute slice electrophysiology and genetically based anatomical tracing of synaptic pathways. More recent studies have applied optogenetic approaches to dissecting the neural circuitry of the lateral septum, a relatively under-studied structure that plays an important role in the control of stress-induced anxiety, as well as neurons in the hypothalamus that control innate fear.

Developmental Biology and Genetics; Neuroscience; Evolutionary and Organismal Biology

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