Joe Terranova, Ph.D.

Throughout my academic career, I have had a strong interest in the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate social behavior. I had obtained bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Women, Gender, Sexuality, Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There, I worked in the lab of Dr. Geert de Vries under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Paul, examining sex differences in the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate social play in rats. I then went on to complete a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at Georgia State University, where I worked in the lab of Dr. Elliott Albers. My graduate research focused on sex differences in how arginine vasopressin and serotonin regulate aggression and acquisition of dominance in Syrian hamsters. For my postdoctoral training, I worked in the lab of Dr. Takashi Kitamura at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, examining the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate empathic behaviors in mice.

My long-term research goals are 1) to ascertain the basic neural circuit mechanisms that regulate complex behaviors, and 2) to understand how these neural circuits can break down and be restored in animal models of psychiatric disorders. To address these broad research goals, I have undertaken 2 major lines of research in my lab. The first project in my lab examines how sleep disruption affects the recall of hippocampal-dependent memories, such as contextual fear conditioning memory, and the corresponding neural circuit mechanisms. A second line of research in my lab examines sex differences in the neural circuit mechanisms that regulate observational fear, which is a well-conserved empathic behavior where an observer uses relevant prior experiences to understand the aversive experience of a demonstrator. I am specifically interested in leveraging deep learning pose estimation to comprehensively annotate and analyze mouse behavior during experimental tasks to glean novel insights that are not easily detectable by human observation. I am also examining the role of oxytocin in the regulation of observational fear.

If you would like to learn more about my lab's research or are interested in potentially joining in the lab, please feel free to reach out! Please include a copy of your resume and/or CV, and a brief message introducing yourself and why you are interested in my lab.

External Profiles:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5678-0259

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nxh0GH0AAAAJ&hl=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jiterranova/