The latest on our trainees
Current Trainees
Seetha Krishnan, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Sheffield Lab
Memories of places and events associated with where drugs of abuse are consumed can trigger cravings and relapse even after years of abstinence. My research aims at understanding the neural mechanisms that are involved in forming these memories and how they are influenced by the actions of different neuromodulators. I study this using mouse models, innovative behavior paradigms and record from dendrites, axons and thousands of neurons in the hippocampus with two-photon microscopy to develop a network level understanding of why drug-related memories are so strong.
Niloufar Dousti Mousavi, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Hedeker Lab
Niloufar recently received her Ph.D. in mathematics, specializing in statistics, from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her primary research focus lies in Model Identification and Variable Selection for high-dimensional sparse datasets and big data analysis.
Her current research is centered on modeling addiction and substance abuse behavior using longitudinal addiction data. The main objective of her work is to uncover and understand the key differentiating factors influencing smoking behavior and to develop efficient models for analyzing the data.
Ben Wang
PhD candidate, Zhuang Lab
Karan Rai, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Garcia Lab
Our understanding of the physiology of fentanyl-related overdose is limited solely to the presence or absence of opioid-induced respiratory depression. There is a gap between OIRD and eventual overdose that encompasses multiple distinct biological and physiological stages that are either interdependent and/or co-occur (e.g. pulmonary edema, cardio-respiratory collapse). How chronic fentanyl use influences the progression, or lack thereof, through this spectrum of overdose is the focus of my research.
My objectives are to: determine the respiratory adaptions that occur following repeated fentanyl use, and how these adaptations influence downstream physiology including hypoxia, pulmonary edema/shunting, cardiorespiratory collapse, cardiac arrest, and eventually death.