Current Fellows
2024 Bruce McEwen Fellows
Dr. Aiempichitkijkarn is a postdoctoral researcher in the Quantitative Ecology Lab at California State University, Long Beach. She will use a long-term dataset from Cayo Santiago to explore how social relationships influence cognitive performance and health outcomes in elderly rhesus macaques. Her project will employ experimental psychology to characterize individual health phenotypes, assess the relationships between cognitive performance and social networks in a Bayesian framework, and integrate these insights into population models to understand how social relationships and cognition influence health in later life.
Zhengyi Sissi Huang is a graduate student in the Venniro Lab at University of Maryland, Baltimore studying neural mechanisms of social behavior. As a Bruce McEwen fellow, Sissi will use operant behavioral modeling, slice electrophysiology, and chemogenetic and optogenetic tools to study the effect of aging in social craving on a cerebellar-thalamic circuit level. Her ultimate goal is to gain new insights into age-related changes in neurobiological mechanisms and social behavior.
Dr. Sosnowski is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis who studies the interplay between species-level tendencies, individual differences, and hormonal correlates of primate cognition and behavior. As a McEwen Fellow, Dr. Sosnowski will study how social attachment in a socially monogamous species of primate (coppery titi monkeys) is related to brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression and healthy cognitive aging, using a touch screen computerized testing program to probe cognitive performance. This work will explore a model of healthy cognitive aging in which social attachments interact with changing biomarker levels to impact the prevalence and magnitude of cognitive decline.
Ezra Winter-Nelson is a PhD candidate in the Cognition & Neuroscience Program at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is interested in why some people are more resilient to breakdowns in the functional organization of the brain during aging than others. Evidence suggests that environmental stressors play a role, and animal models provide a valuable approach to investigating these factors. Building on his previous work establishing a mouse model of brain network aging, Ezra’s project will extend the cross-species analysis to include macaques and marmosets. He will also examine a potential environmental factor impacting brain network vulnerability: social rank of macaques.
2024 Travel Fellow
Dr. Rincón-Cortés is an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience Department at University of Texas at Dallas. Her lab’s overarching research program examines experience-dependent plasticity of reward-related behavioral and brain function throughout the lifespan, and whether this plasticity is modulated by factors such as sex and developmental timing. Her lab’s ongoing studies seek to identify dopaminergic mechanisms by which maternal adversity disrupts reward and motivational processes across generations (dam, offspring). To study changes in mesolimbic dopamine (DA) function and DA signaling, they use an integrated approach including behavior, endocrinology, neuropharmacology, in vivo electrophysiology, as well as cell-type and circuit-specific manipulations. Dr. Rincón-Cortés’s immediate research plans are to shift from conducting in vivo extracellular recordings to genetically targeted optical recordings of midbrain DA neurons in awake-behaving maternal rodents under adaptive and maladaptive (chronic stress) conditions. This will allow her to assess the impact of adversity on reward-related DA responses during distinct reward-related and motivated behaviors to evaluate phasic changes that are time-locked to behavior. Importantly, she also plans to implement this integrated approach in developing male and female rats to evaluate the impact of ELA on responses to social and drug rewards across development and probe underlying neural mechanisms.