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17
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Introduction
Heather earned a BSc in Animal Science from the University of Maryland (2010) and an MSc in Laboratory Animal Science from Eastern Virginia Medical School (2016). She holds LATG certification through AALAS. Before joining the University of Texas, she managed the immunocompromised rodent breeding core at the Duke Cancer Center Isolation Facility. She now investigates sex differences in glutamatergic neurotransmission and supports the INIA-Neuroimmune consortium, collecting electrophysiology data.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2015 - April 2019
Education
August 2014 - May 2016
August 2007 - May 2010
Publications
Publications (17)
Background
The transition from childhood to adulthood, or adolescence, a developmental stage, is characterized by psychosocial and biological changes. The nucleus accumbens (NAc), a striatal brain region composed of the core (NAcC) and shell (NAcSh), has been linked to risk-taking behavior and implicated in reward seeking and evaluation. Most neuro...
Chronic alcohol exposure results in widespread dysregulation of gene expression that contributes to the pathogenesis of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Long noncoding RNAs are key regulators of the transcriptome that we hypothesize coordinate alcohol‐induced transcriptome dysregulation and contribute to AUD. Based on RNA‐Sequencing data of human prefro...
Background: Adolescence, a developmental stage, is characterized by psychosocial and biological changes. The nucleus accumbens (NAc), a striatal brain region composed of the core (NAcC) and shell (NAcSh), has been linked to risk-taking behavior and implicated in reward seeking and evaluation. Most neurons in the NAc are medium spiny neurons (MSNs)...
Addiction to alcohol, and other substances of abuse, is a chronic relapsing condition causing widespread changes in gene expression throughout different brain-regions and cell-types. The mammalian genome consists of protein-coding and non-coding RNA; however, protein-coding genes account for < 2% of the genome. Conducting RNA-Seq on multiple human...
Treatment options for Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD) have minimally advanced since 2004, while the annual deaths and economic toll have increased alarmingly. Phosphodiesterase type 4 (PDE4) is associated with alcohol and nicotine dependence. PDE4 inhibitors were identified as a potential AUD treatment using a novel bioinformatics approach. We prioriti...
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are important players in normal biological function and disease pathogenesis. Of the many biomolecules packaged into EVs, coding and noncoding RNA transcripts are of particular interest for their ability to significantly alter cellular and molecular processes. Here we investigate how chronic ethanol exposure impacts EV...
The Agranular Insular Cortex (AIC) is implicated in alcohol use disorder and pharmacologically relevant concentrations of acute ethanol inhibit N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR)-mediated glutamatergic synaptic transmission and plasticity onto layer 2/3 AIC pyramidal neurons. However, it is not known whether the actions of ethanol on glutamaterg...
Treatment options for Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD) have minimally advanced since 2004, while the annual deaths and economic toll have become alarmingly high. Bringing potential therapeutics beyond the bench and into the clinic for AUD requires rigorous pharmacological screening across molecular, behavioral, pre-clinical, and clinical studies in neur...
The tumor-specific targeting of chemotherapeutic agents for specific necrosis of cancer cells without affecting the normal cells poses a great challenge for researchers and scientists. Though extensive research has been carried out to investigate chemotherapy-based targeted drug delivery, the identification of the most promising strategy capable of...
Wounds are often recalcitrant to traditional wound dressings and a bioactive and biodegradable wound dressing using hydrogel membranes can be a promising approach for wound healing applications. The present research aimed to design hydrogel membranes based on hyaluronic acid, pullulan and polyvinyl alcohol and loaded with chitosan based cefepime na...
A growing number of studies implicate alterations in glutamatergic signaling within the reward circuitry of the brain during alcohol abuse and dependence. A key integrator of glutamatergic signaling in the reward circuit is the nucleus accumbens, more specifically, the dopamine D1 receptor-expressing medium spiny neurons (D1-MSNs) within this regio...
A BSTRACT
Nucleus accumbens dopamine D1 receptor-expressing medium spiny neurons (D1-MSNs) have been implicated in the formation of dependence to many drugs of abuse including alcohol. Previous studies have revealed that acute alcohol exposure suppresses glutamatergic signaling within the accumbens and repeated alcohol exposure enhances glutamaterg...
Questions
Question (1)
If you use/have used a tattooing system for neonate rodents, which one is/was it? And do you like it? We are researching systems for a future project.
