#TraineeTuesday: Stephanie Staszko, PhD

This #TraineeTuesday, meet Stephanie Staszko, PhD, a Postdoctoral Associate in the Kaye Lab! Her lab has recently secured funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the noradrenergic mechanisms underlying the innate fear of heights in mice.

The grant application was centered on a groundbreaking project led by Stephanie, where she developed a novel behavioral task and used calcium imaging, norepinephrine imaging, and optogenetics to delineate the neural circuitry underlying height avoidance behavior. This project provides an innate threat model that researchers can use in rodents, offering direct behavioral parallels in humans.

According to Stephanie, many tasks traditionally used in neuroscience research involved predator stimuli, which generally don’t evoke similar fear responses in humans. The group hopes to leverage this aspect of the task to better understand the circuits that underlie processing of threatening environmental stimuli.

Stephanie is a first-generation college student from southern Mississippi, raised in a single-parent household. Her early fascination with animal and human behavior – such as wondering what caused individuals to be resilient or susceptible to trauma-related psychiatric disease - shaped her research interests regarding the field.

At the University of Mississippi for college, she collaborated with Ken Sufka, PhD, developing a rat model of migraine for her Honors thesis. Her graduate studies at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, under Max Flecher, PhD, and John Boughter, PhD, focused on understanding neural circuits underlying behavior. There, she proposed to utilize calcium imaging in freely-moving mice to investigate brain encoding of taste, specifically during exposure to novelty and illness-induced aversion. By independently facilitating this novel technique, she saw that both population and single-cell imaging generate vast quantities of data, which propelled her to practice her computational and analytical skills as a postdoc. This led her to AI, as she saw an opportunity to develop research related to trauma-related disorders.

When choosing between postdoc programs, she was drawn to the collegiality and enthusiasm of members of the Yale Molecular Psychiatry Division of the Psychiatry Department and the Wu Tsai Institute. Stephanie was impressed that senior faculty members, regardless of their rank or status, were available and engaged during the division’s weekly meetings.

The Yale research environment, with the newly established Wu Tsai Institute, offers Stephanie an ideal community to pursue her research goals: understanding how neural circuits and computations drive behavior while training her computational skills.

Thus far, Stephanie has interesting preliminary results regarding the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in mediating behavioral response to height threat. From this, she has developed her current objectives, focused on understanding the role of mPFC norepinephrine in that process. Looking ahead, she aims to obtain an independent faculty position in a medical school setting, where she will investigate how internal states, such as anxiety and arousal, influence sensory processing. To do so, she will combine multiple techniques, including optogenetics, circuit tracing, in vivo imaging, and naturalistic behavioral assessments.

Stephanie also hopes to serve as a role model and mentor for other neuroscientists who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.