Jason A Kaufman, Ph.D.

Dr. Kaufman’s research program focuses on behavioral neuroscience in adult zebrafish, with particular emphasis on learning, stress responsiveness, social influences on behavior, and adaptive behavioral plasticity. Current work centers on the development of a calibrated system designed to study startle responses and habituation learning under precisely controlled experimental conditions.

A major goal of this work is to determine how stress and social context alter the regulation of behavioral responsiveness. Recent projects have examined alarm-substance signaling, behavioral responses to pathologically behaving conspecifics, and the cue-dependent limits of stress contagion in zebrafish. Future studies will investigate individual variability in habituation, the effects of acute and chronic stress on learning, and the ways in which social environments influence adaptive responses to repeated sensory events. Behavioral findings are increasingly being integrated with molecular approaches, including qPCR, to identify biological correlates of behavioral state and plasticity.

Dr. Kaufman’s earlier research involved comparative neuroanatomy, neuroimaging, neurohistology, and three-dimensional tissue imaging. This work included structural MRI, diffusion imaging, positron emission tomography, optical clearing, confocal microscopy, and quantitative histological analysis across a range of basic and disease-related questions. Although these areas remain an important foundation of his scientific background, his current laboratory program is centered on zebrafish behavioral neuroscience and the development of reproducible experimental platforms for studying learning, stress, and socially modulated behavior.