Ki A Goosens, PhD

Dr. Goosens studies chronic stress and its impact on the brain and body. Stress responses can be adaptive, but when experienced repeatedly or over a protracted period of time, stress is strongly associated with multiple types of disease, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, obesity, and diabetes. Her current lines of research focus on 1) Identifying novel circuit mechanisms for associative emotional memory formation and their dysregulation by stress; 2) Understanding the mechanisms by which emotional memory encoding is modulated; and 3) Studies to identify and characterize the endocrine factors that underlie stress-induced vulnerability in rodent models of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), and obesity, and also understand how these factors regulate normal function in the brain and periphery.

The lab website is located at: https://labs.icahn.mssm.edu/goosenslab/