Keywords: cerebellum, social, development, cognition, autism, aging, addiction
Lab Area: Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology Neuroscience
Actively Recruiting Undergraduate Researchers: No
Overview
The SOCIAL (Study of Circuits in Adolescent life) Neurobiology lab, led by Dr. Verpeut, studies the development of neural circuits and structure in early life to understand behavior. The lab specifically focuses on long distance neural circuits from the cerebellar cortex involved in social and flexible behavior. We are interested in understanding sensitive periods of neural development and how circuits encode behavior throughout the lifespan. Our main goals encompass four main areas including sensitive periods of neural development, understanding natural behavior, decoding how genes and the environment influence neural maturation and aging and analyzing the effect of neuromodulators on downstream signaling pathways. To accomplish these goals, the lab utilizes viral neural manipulation techniques, immunohistochemistry, genomics, and unsupervised machine learning to understand behavior in rodent models.