We often discuss psychiatric disorders as illnesses of adulthood, but disorders linked to anxiety, impulse control, and feeding disorders often first emerge in adolescence. Early life stress (ELS) during postnatal development increases the lifetime risk for psychopathologies, with stress in development being associated with higher rates of negative outcomes than similar events in adulthood. Investigating the early phases of neural development and how stress perturbs normative development is key to understanding the mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders. The work in Gabriela Manzano Nieves' lab focuses on the developing brain (juvenile to adult) to identify the changes that tip the scales between a healthy brain and one at risk for stress-related psychiatric disorders. The lab aims to uncover how the flow of information within and between distinct brain regions changes as mice grow from pups into adults. This line of work is fundamental to understanding why critical periods during postnatal development are more sensitive to environmental and social stressors, and why many psychiatric illnesses, such as anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and eating disorders, first emerge during development. Currently, the lab is tackling the following open questions in the field: Together, this research plan seeks to elucidate neuronal mechanisms that explain why adolescents are more reward motivated and to understand why early-life experiences, such as stressors or learning, can create vulnerabilities to psychiatric disorders (such as addiction and impulse control) in adulthood. Techniques To study developmental circuits, the lab uses a combination of circuit-level (2-P imaging, multi-site fiber photometry, optogenetics, chemogenetics), computational analysis (GLM, classifiers, dimensionality reduction, etc.), molecular (western blots, qPCR) and anatomical techniques (immunohistochemistry, neuronal tracing). Accepting graduate students for Fall 2025
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