Congratulations to Professor Rebecca Shansky, who was recently awarded the Brain Research Foundation’s Annual Seed Grant.

The BRF Seed Grant program was established in 1981, to provide start-up funding for new research projects in the field of neuroscience that will likely lead to extramural funding from the National Institutes of Health or other outside funding sources.

Prof. Shansky writes the following about the work for which she received the grant:

Women are twice as likely as men to develop PTSD after a trauma, but the neurobiology that underlies this discrepancy is unknown. One possibility is that the brain circuits that process and respond to the initial traumatic event are distinct in males and females, which could lead to different long-term outcomes. We recently found that female rats are more likely than males to exhibit an active fear response (“darting”), as opposed to the more commonly observed passive fear response (“freezing”). Selection of an active vs. passive response predicted the animal’s ability to adapt its behavior on subsequent tests. A better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie these divergent behaviors may therefore provide insight into the factors that increase a person’s risk for PTSD, and help develop treatments better targeted to women or men. Our hypothesis is that neural pathways connecting distinct parts of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and periaqueductal gray (PAG) exhibit sex-specific activity during a traumatic event to drive active vs passive responses. To test this hypothesis, we will use resting state functional imaging and Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADDs) techniques to isolate and manipulate the mPFC-PAG circuitry. This seed project will help define the role of a novel circuit in fear response strategy, and lay groundwork for future investigations into the cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate the switch between active and passive fear responses. 

Well done, Prof. Shansky!