Research
My research interests include the effects of negative experiences on brain plasticity and social behaviors. My work uses viral and genetic manipulations to identify novel therapeutic targets to mediate such consequences. Below you will find descriptions of these projects along with any relevant publications.
Adult hippocampal plasticity
Ongoing projects investigating how different types of early life adversity affect unique mechanisms of hippocampal plasticity and subsequently affect hippocampal dependent social behaviors
Functional characteristics of adult neurogenesis:
Cope, E. C., Waters, R. C., Diethorn, E. J., Pagliai, K. A., Dias, C. G., Tsuda, M., Cameron, H. A., & Gould, E. (2020). Adult-Born Neurons in the Hippocampus Are Essential for Social Memory Maintenance. eNeuro, 7(6), ENEURO.0182-20.2020. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0182-20.2020
Differential effects of different types of early life adversity
Review:
Waters, R. C., & Gould, E. (2022). Early Life Adversity and Neuropsychiatric Disease: Differential Outcomes and Translational Relevance of Rodent Models. Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 16, 860847. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.860847
Affective disorders
Empirical study:
Waters, R. C., Worth, H. M., Vasquez, B., & Gould, E. (2022). Inhibition of adult neurogenesis reduces avoidance behavior in male, but not female, mice subjected to early life adversity. Neurobiology of stress, 17, 100436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynstr.2022.100436
Neural development
Ongoing work investigating the timescale at which ELA-induced changes to plasticity mechanisms happen
Ongoing work exploring how global neural activation patterns are disrupted during early life adversity using methods such as iDISCO (brain clearing)
Ongoing work investigating how and when early life adversity-induced social behaviors emerge and sex-dependent differences among them