Erin Calipari
Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research (VCAR)
Vanderbilt Brain Institute (VBI)
The interplay between rapid, temporally specific neuronal activation and longer-term changes in transcription is of critical importance in the expression of appropriate or, in the case of disease, inappropriate behaviors. Together, my research seeks to understand how information about stimuli is encoded in the brain. Developing new approaches to understand how activity-dependent changes are stored within particular cells and circuits at the level of the epigenome will allow us to understand adaptive and maladaptive processes in reward, motivation, and associative learning.
The interplay between rapid, temporally specific neuronal activation and longer-term changes in transcription is of critical importance in the expression of appropriate or, in the case of disease, inappropriate behaviors. Together, my research seeks to understand how information about stimuli is encoded in the brain. Developing new approaches to understand how activity-dependent changes are stored within particular cells and circuits at the level of the epigenome will allow us to understand adaptive and maladaptive processes in reward, motivation, and associative learning.
Keywords: Circuits , Motivated Behaviors , Addiction , Dopamine , Reward , Learning
Research Area: Gene Regulation , Neurodegeneration and Neuroinflamation , Developmental Neuroscience