I completed my graduate training in 2007 with Dr. Matt McEchron at the Penn State College of Medicine.  My graduate work examined the activity of single neurons in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex during trace fear conditioning.  That work showed that these structures exhibit complementary patterns of activity that encode different aspects of the trace fear association.

In Dr. Fred Helmstetter’s lab at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, I will examine the interaction of the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex during the formation of the hippocampus-dependent trace fear memory.  I will examine gene expression and general activity in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex during different phases of memory formation and maintenance to examine the cooperative interaction of these structures over time.