Category: Research Publications

Our laboratory has previously shown that chronic ethanol exposure elicits enhanced working memory performance in female, but not male, adult Sprague-Dawley rats, indicative of a fundamental sex difference in cortical plasticity. Recent studies have furthermore revealed that females display markedly reduced HCN-mediated channel activity in inhibitory Martinotti interneurons after chronic...

This study investigates the impact of allopregnanolone ([3α,5α]3-hydroxypregnan-20-one or 3α,5α-tetrahydroprogesterone (3α,5α-THP); 10 mg/kg, IP) on fractalkine/CX3-C motif chemokine ligand 1 (CX3CL1) levels, associated signaling components, and markers for microglial and astrocytic cells in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) of male and female alcohol-preferring (P) rats. Previous research suggested that 3α,5α-THP enhances...

Mindful Self-Compassion for Teens, an 8 session program which focuses on cultivating self-compassion as a coping skill for teens, was determined to be feasible, acceptable, and efficacious in preventing the development of clinically significant depression in adolescents with some depressive symptoms.

Peer group mentoring facilitated by senior faculty represents an effective approach. We explored motivations, benefits, and challenges for facilitators enrolled to deploy an intervention in the context of a randomized controlled trial that tested two peer group mentoring strategies for underrepresented early career researchers.

We studied cognitive development and psychopathology in children 4 and 6 years old who where at familial risk for developing schizophrenia and found delayed cognitive development and high rates of symptoms such as anxiety and attention problems, earlier than has previously been described. This indicates that risk for schizophrenia is...

A large cohort of 706 women sexual assault survivors presenting to emergency care were recruited nationwide and followed over one year post-assault. Our findings suggested that the vast majority of women rated their research experience as positive (95-97%), denied drawbacks (84-89%), and reported participating was worth it (93-95%), and these...

This work examines whether there are changes in the self-report of anxiety and depression symptoms in adults with cystic fibrosis (CF) who started taking elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor (E/T/I), a new medication that shows great promise in the treatment of CF. The study found that there were no changes in these symptoms in...

Research on resilience after trauma has often focused on individual-level factors (e.g., extensive trauma history) and overlooked influential neighborhood-level factors that may help mitigate the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We applied geospatial analyses to the AURORA Study dataset and evaluated whether greenspace was associated with PTSD trajectories. We...

A deep learning AI model was developed to estimate gestational age (GA) from blind ultrasonography sweeps and incorporated into a low-cost, battery-powered device, aiming to improve pregnancy care in low-resource settings. The study found that novice users, with no prior sonography training, could estimate GA with the AI tool as...

Determining the causes of schizophrenia has been a notoriously intractable problem, resistant to a multitude of investigative approaches over centuries. In recent decades, genomic studies have delivered hundreds of robust findings that implicate nearly 300 common genetic variants (via genome-wide association studies) and more than 20 rare variants (via whole-exome...