My research is about brain development in the context of medical illness, particularly childhood cancer. Key neuroscience tools I use include: neuroimaging, neuropsychological testing and experimental cognitive neuroscience tasks. I recently expanded my research to include neurochemical markers of...

My research is aimed at understanding brain-behavior relationships in humans, at systems level. Two main approaches are used: the lesion method, in which brain-damaged patients are studied with neuropsychological procedures to determine how certain lesion sites are related to certain cognitive and...

Neurons extend long projections called axons that establish connections throughout the body. In humans, axons can reach over a meter in length and extreme isolation from the cell body imposes unique challenges on this compartment. Axonal degeneration is a prominent event in many neurodegenerative...

Serotonin neurons are mainly localized to the raphe nuclei of the brainstem, but their axons are widely distributed throughout the nervous system and have a ubiquitous role in physiological processes and behavior. Adding to this complexity is the diverse array of high-affinity receptors that bind...

In patient with lewy body disease, the protein alpha-synuclein aggregates, leading to severe multi-system symptoms, including hallucinations, loss of smell, dementia, imbalance, fluctuating confusion, and anxiety/depression. The main research goal of the Aldridge Laboratory is to understand the...

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is the leading cause of death in patients with intractable epilepsy, but specific mechanisms of how a seizure can cause death are poorly understood. Research efforts in my laboratory are focused on using animal models to understand the mechanisms by which...

My laboratory is interested in the effect of environmental pollutants, such as neurotoxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and their transformation products on the developing brain. We use exposomics approaches to identify the metabolites formed in various model systems, including animal models...

We study the neural circuits and intraneuronal signaling mechanisms that regulate appetite, body weight, sleep, and cardiorespiratory function in mice and aim to understand how these regulatory processes go awry in metabolic disorders. To this end, we employee state-of-the-art neuroscience...

My research focuses on elucidating central brain mechanisms underlying Alzheimer’s disease, psychosocial disorders, heart failure and sudden cardiac death. The lab uses multidisciplinary approaches including radiotelemetry, optogenetics, neurophysiology, pharmacology, behavioral and molecular...

My research focuses on the process of word retrieval in normal speakers, and in speakers with acquired neurogenic language disorders (particularly aphasia). I am interested in exploring the factors which make words easier or harder to retrieve, and how these factors influence the production of...

Alcoholism, alcohol abuse, and the medical complications of excessive drinking are major world-wide health problems. There are three long-term goals of my laboratory: (1) Alcohol exposure during development results in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and induces profound damages to the...

In the lab, we use genetic techniques to isolate and manipulate neurons that mediate basic physiologic functions including sleep, appetite, bladder control, and thermoregulation. My focus lies in identifying and deciphering previously unknown connections between neurons in the brainstem and other...