Nicole Ferrara
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, IL·Neuroscience
Time spent with peers is not optional for a healthy mind, especially during adolescence. When that contact is cut off, as happened widely during the COVID-19 pandemic, social behavior suffers, and teenagers appear especially vulnerable.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Physiology
- Topics
basomedial amygdala
infralimbic cortex
medial prefrontal cortex
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Test whether social deprivation reduces excitation of basomedial amygdala (BMA) principal neurons, using in vitro electrophysiology in brain slices from adolescent and adult rats to compare circuit maturation across ages.
- Determine how activity of parvalbumin-expressing inhibitory neurons, which damp local circuits, shapes BMA output and social behavior, and whether social deprivation lowers that activity selectively in adults.
- Measure BMA activity during social investigation with fiber photometry, an optical readout of neural activity in behaving rats, to link circuit changes after social deprivation to play and investigation behavior.
- Use chemogenetics, which switches targeted neurons on or off with a designer drug, to test whether the infralimbic cortex-to-BMA pathway causally controls adolescent and adult social engagement.
More about the research
This project asks how a lack of social opportunity changes the brain circuitry that drives social engagement, and why adolescents are affected differently from adults. The focus is the amygdala, a brain region that regulates social behavior and is itself sensitive to unusual social experience, studied in rats whose age-typical social behaviors are play in adolescence and investigation in adulthood.
Why it matters
Rates of neuropsychiatric conditions marked by social difficulty rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, with adolescents at highest risk. By pinpointing how limited social contact alters a specific amygdala circuit at different ages, the work could identify age-specific brain mechanisms behind social dysfunction and point toward targets or timing for interventions aimed at young people recovering from social isolation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Guillermo Gonzalez-Burgos
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Neuroscience
Define the gene-expression markers that distinguish continuous and delayed fast-spiking parvalbumin interneuron subtypes in mouse prefrontal and visual cortex. Patch-seq links RNA, electrical activity and shape in single cells.
Minghong Ma
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Test whether olfactory epithelium inflammation or smell-neuron inactivation from adolescence to adulthood alters prefrontal pyramidal neurons in mice, using patch clamp recordings, and reverse effects with chemogenetic activation of olfactory-prefrontal circuits.
Barna Dudok
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test whether CCK and PV basket cells, two types of inhibitory neurons, are active in different brain states in a kainate mouse model of temporal lobe epilepsy, using two-photon calcium imaging with hippocampal field recordings.
The school
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science: 4 labs on PI Pages, $12M a year on research, 15 research doctorates a year.
More about Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science
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