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I have been working at the VA Medical Center and in the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland since 1979. I entered graduate school at the University of Colorado to obtain a Ph.D. in social psychology. Fortuitously, I was sidetracked into instead studying behavioral neuroscience (AKA biopsychology) at the fledgling Institute for Behavioral Genetics in Boulder. I鈥檝e been pretty much surrounded by mice ever since. I did post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee and was a Lecturer in Psychology at San Jos茅 State and then UC-Santa Barbara, and then held a two-year research position at a Dutch pharmaceutical company in the Dutch hinterlands before Portland.

My research interest is in understanding individual differences in behavioral susceptibility to alcohol and other drugs of abuse, and their genetic and neurobiological bases. Most recently, I鈥檝e been breeding mice that voluntarily drink alcohol until they become intoxicated, i.e. developing a mouse model of university students. I鈥檓 working with collaborators to figure out how many genes we鈥檝e affected in the process, which ones they are, and what their biological functions are. We鈥檙e using that information to try to predict some drugs that are already FDA approved that might be re-purposed to try as treatments for alcoholism.  My expertise is in mouse behavioral tests that try to capture human traits such as anxiety, sensitivity to drug鈥檚 rewarding or aversive effects, incoordination, learning and memory, novelty-seeking, and so forth. I am less fluent in rat than in mouse but the languages are related. 

I am familiar with psychiatric genetics/human genetics methods, but not really expert in the more esoteric of them. I am also familiar with the big data/genomics/informatics approaches, but again not really expert there, either. 

Dr. Adrienne Antonson is a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She joined the UIUC faculty in January 2021.
Antonson's research is anchored within the fields of immunology, microbiology, and developmental and behavioral neuroscience. She uses translational animal models to investigate inflammatory and neurodevelopmental origins of behavioral abnormalities and mental health disorders. Focusing on the prenatal period as a critical developmental window, she has demonstrated that maternal insults such as viral infection and psychological stress during pregnancy alter neuroimmune signatures in the offspring brain, leading to disrupted behaviors.
Research interests:


Prenatal immune determinants of neurodevelopment and behavior


Research areas:


Molecular and cellular neuroscience


Neural & genomic bases of behavior


Neural bases of disease and disorders


Neural development


Education


Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, The Ohio State University, Columbus OH, 2021


Ph.D., Immunophysiology and Behavior Program, Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2018


NIH T32 postdoctoral fellowship, The Ohio State University Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, 2020

 works to increase reproductive efficiency in humans and animals by increasing our understanding of the ovary, oviduct, and uterus. Projects in his lab include understanding how the uterus stores nutrients to support early pregnancy, how endocrine disruption chemicals (EDCs) affect the function of the oviduct, and the early events in the development of ovarian cancer.
More information:
Approximately 50% of pregnancies are lost in both humans and livestock, with most losses occurring before or during embryo implantation. During this time embryos are dependent on secretions to support and regulate embryonic growth, while the uterine endometrium must prepare for implantation. Dean's lab is working to understand how nutrients, such as glucose, are taken up, stored by the uterus, and used by the embryo and endometrium during early pregnancy. Their goal is to undercover ways to increase fertility in humans and livestock.
Ovarian cancer is the 5th leading cause of cancer death in women. Part of the reason for this is a poor understanding of the early events in disease development. It is now clear that high-grade serous ovarian cancer (the most lethal subtype) originates in the fallopian tube epithelium and spreads to the ovary very early in disease development. The Dean lab is working to understand how these tumor cells recruit cancer associated fibroblasts and remodel the extracellular matrix in the ovary during colonization.
Affiliations:
Dean is an assistant professor in the  and the  in the  (ACES) at the .