Assistant Professor
Research Areas: Learning and memory, fear, reward, GABAergic engrams, experience-dependent plasticity, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorder, NMDA receptors

Biography

The Cummings lab seeks to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the brain acquires, stores, expresses, and suppresses memories in both health and disease. Specifically, we examine how distinct emotional memories, including those that are aversive (such as fear) and appetitive (such as food and drug reward), are differentially encoded in heterogeneous cell populations, or 'engrams.' To do this, we use a multidisciplinary combination of cutting-edge approaches including viral and genetic techniques in transgenic mice, activity-dependent cell tagging, cell- and circuit-specific in vivo optogenetic manipulations, ex vivo whole-cell electrophysiological recordings in brain slices, and in vivo calcium imaging techniques in freely behaving mice including fiber photometry and miniature head-mounted microscopes (Miniscopes). Our ultimate goal is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of these fundamental processes to reveal new therapeutic targets for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder.

For descriptions of each ongoing research area, please see our lab website linked above.

We welcome all in our laboratory.

Education

Graduate School
Ph.D. SUNY University at Buffalo 2016

Postdoctoral Fellowship
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Contact

Email
kac3@uab.edu

Phone