Elizabeth Lucas
Bio
Research in the Lucas Lab is driven by a passion to improve the lives of people with mental illness. Women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with fear-, anxiety-, and mood-based psychiatric disorders, yet our progress in elucidating the neural circuits underlying susceptibility to mental illness in females has remained stagnant due to the exclusion of female subjects in preclinical research. Our research program utilizes a multifaceted, systems-based approach that combines in vivo behavioral manipulations with ex vivo electrophysiological, transcriptional, anatomical, and endocrinological analyses in mouse models to dissect the neurobiological mechanisms underlying sex differences in behavioral states relevant to mental illness at the levels of the cell and the circuit. This research seeks to expand upon previous research conducted by ourselves and others, in hopes of attaining novel, potentially sex-specific, therapeutic targets for devastating mental illnesses disproportionally experienced by women, for which there are currently limited effective treatments and no cures.
Publications
- Sex-Specific Neural Networks of Cued Threat Conditioning: A Pilot Study , FRONTIERS IN SYSTEMS NEUROSCIENCE (2022)
- Prazosin during fear conditioning facilitates subsequent extinction in male C57Bl/6N mice , PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY (2018)
- GABAergic interneurons: the orchestra or the conductor in fear learning and memory? , Brain Research Bulletin (2017)
- Multimodal and Site-Specific Plasticity of Amygdala Parvalbumin Interneurons after Fear Learning , Neuron (2016)
- Cerebellar transcriptional alterations with Purkinje cell dysfunction and loss in mice lacking PGC-1α , Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, Special Issue, Neurodegeneration: from Genetics to Molecules (2015)
- Cortical PGC-1α-Dependent Transcripts Are Reduced in Postmortem Tissue From Patients With Schizophrenia , Schizophrenia Bulletin (2015)
- Interneuron Transcriptional Dysregulation Causes Frequency-Dependent Alterations in the Balance of Inhibition and Excitation in Hippocampus , Journal of Neuroscience (2015)
- Mice lacking TrkB in parvalbumin-positive cells exhibit sexually dimorphic behavioral phenotypes , Behavioural Brain Research (2014)
- Mice lacking the transcriptional coactivator PGC-1α exhibit alterations in inhibitory synaptic transmission in the motor cortex , Neuroscience (2014)
- PGC-1 Provides a Transcriptional Framework for Synchronous Neurotransmitter Release from Parvalbumin-Positive Interneurons , Journal of Neuroscience (2014)