From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesday Twitter series
This #TraineeTuesday, welcome Alexa Soares — a Yale INP PhD Student in the Picciotto lab — to the stage. She recently published a review paper in Psychopharmacology on sex differences in stress-induced alcohol drinking.
In the review, Alexa references preclinical studies to show that women are more likely to increase alcohol consumption in response to stress. She and her team linked this finding to neuroimmune interactions taking place in the amygdala.
This review laid out some exciting hypotheses for her to test. In her upcoming experiments, Alexa will investigate the circuit and cellular-level changes underlying how stress alters drinking behavior.
“This project has been hugely collaborative — both with other members of the lab, and with other labs at Yale. This has given me a unique opportunity to work with so many different people and it’s been cool to draw on their different areas of expertise, ranging from molecular techniques to more clinical perspectives,” Alexa said.
For a long time, neuroscience research has focused on male subjects and male preclinical models, Alexa explained, which means there’s less data on mental illness in women. This makes us "less equipped to help women" with conditions like alcohol use disorder.
She's working to change that.
I’m excited to be part of the push towards filling in that knowledge gap and providing a better understanding of the neurobiology underlying stress and substance use in women.
Alexa Soares
Before Yale, Alexa earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Northeastern. During Yale INP interviews, she was immediately drawn to how "supportive and collaborative" the research community was — leading her to join us. We're so happy to have you, Alexa!