Meet Rafael Perez, PhD, a postdoc in the Picciotto lab who was awarded the Kavli Postdoctoral Award for Academic Diversity! This award supports postdocs who bring a diversity of perspectives, identities and backgrounds to Yale’s neuroscience community.
Perez’s work is a marriage of neuroscience and pharmacology. He currently investigates the neuronal mechanisms underlying associative opioid tolerance, looking at brain regions that might be involved in this behavior. Using optical and chemogenetic tools, Perez hopes to continue examining the cell types and circuits that drive associative tolerance.
“I am deeply honored and grateful to the selection’s committee and the Kavli Institute leadership,” Perez said. “I am also really excited to conduct the experiments I proposed in my application and to use the funds provided by the award to pursue ambitious research avenues that hopefully will become the foundation to my pathway to independence.”
Perez emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States as a teenager. His passion for neuroscience sprouted after a summer internship at the University of Pennsylvania coupled with his undergraduate education at York College of Pennsylvania. Since then, Perez had been fascinated by how strong emotional experiences altered the brain at the molecular level and vice versa.
He went on to obtain a PhD in Pharmacology from Vanderbilt University, in the lab of Danny Winder, PhD. Perez studied cocaine use relapse, and the potential use of guanfacine as medication against it. By analyzing the contributions of alpha2-adrenergic receptors to stress-induced relapse of cocaine use, he evaluated the possible effectiveness of guanfacine, an agonist of these receptors, as a treatment against relapse.
Here at Yale, I have found a community that is driven, ambitious and risk-taking but also kind, curious and approachable.
Rafael Perez, PhD
“This research is important because guanfacine is FDA-approved, well-tolerated, and affordable, making it a viable option for rural or impoverished communities,” Perez said.
Perez decided to come here for his postdoc because of Yale’s “strong tradition of top notch neuropharmacology and translational work.” He specifically knew that he wanted to work with his mentor Dr. Marina Picciotto because of “her strong track record of mentorship and the lab’s exciting work.” The highlight of his experience so far has been getting to know colleagues within the Picciotto Lab, the Molecular Psychiatry Division and the Neuroscience Department.
“I feel that the environment here has already made me a better scientist and I cannot wait to be able to interact with my peers/colleagues across the departments in person,” Perez said.
Perez’s long-term goal is to establish his own lab at an R1 research institution. He hopes to study how environmental stressors and biological factors interact to drive disparities in addiction outcomes in underserved communities, while also training the next generation of diverse scientists.