Michael Drew
I am interested in how adult-generated neurons modulate psychological processes. I can trace my interest in this topic directly back to two talks I saw as a graduate student. One talk was by Tracey Shors on her work linking adult hippocampal neurogenesis to trace classical conditioning and the second was by Rene Hen on his work suggesting that antidepressant drugs act, in part, by stimulating adult hippocampal neurogenesis. These were among the first studies to provide causal evidence for a role of adult neurogenesis in behavioral plasticity, and for a psychologist like myself, they raised so many exciting questions. For instance, what underlying psychological processes depend on adult-generated neurons? Is this dependence general or is it limited to particular situations? At what cell-developmental stage to adult-generated neurons contribute to these processes?
I joined Rene Hen’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow so I could pursue questions like these using mouse models. So far our work has demonstrated that adult-generated neurons are required for some forms of hippocampus dependent learning but not others. For instance, we’ve found that arresting adult hippocampal neurogenesis using irradiation or a genetic method impairs contextual fear conditioning, particularly under conditions that require rapid learning in a novel context. One of my current projects is to use contextual fear conditioning as a model system to analyze the role of adult-generated neurons in memory processes like encoding, consolidation, and retrieval.
