My career as a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow and now as an Assistant Professor has been dedicated to working on disorders that are developmental as their origin. As a graduate student I worked in Dr. Pat Levitt s laboratory examining changes in cortical development due to prenatal exposure to cocaine. It was here that I was first exposed to behavioral disorders in children. We developed an animal model to use to examine what happens to the brain if it is exposed to cocaine in-utero .
Cocaine affects the dopaminergic, serotonergic, and neuroepinepherine systems.
We chose to examine how cocaine affects two of these systems by examining cortical areas that receive input from one or the other neurotransmitter. We chose to examine the dopaminergic system and the serotonergic system by looking at cellular development in the anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal and primary visual cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex receives a dopaminergic innervation and is important in processing information dealing with learning, memory, attention and social behaviors. Primary visual cortex receives a dense serotonergic innervation and is a primary sensory region. Our work showed that disruption of the developing dopaminergic system leads to changes in outgrowth of dendrites in pyramidal cells.