Shannon Gourley, PhD
Emory University
Dr. Gourley is an Associate Professor at the Emory University School of Medicine and a Director of Graduate Studies for the neuroscience training program at Emory. Her lab uses appetitive conditioning and other behavioral neuroscience approaches to understand how developmental experiences (social experience, exposure to addictive drugs) impact decision-making behavior in adulthood. The team marries behavioral techniques with high-resolution microscopy; viral-mediated gene transfer; projection-specific manipulation; and pharmacological strategies to better understand why adolescence serves as a vulnerability period to stressors and addictive drugs, on the one hand, and an opportunity to confer resilience to long-term negative outcomes, on the other.
Social experience in adolescence shapes prefrontal cortex structure and function in adulthood: Using model organisms to identify mechanisms of resilience
Prefrontal cortical (PFC) development is profoundly influenced by the social environment, disruptions to which may prime the emergence of psychopathology across the lifespan. We investigated the neurobehavioral consequences of isolation experienced during adolescence in mice, and in particular, the long-term consequences that were detectable even despite normalization of the social milieu. Isolation produced biases toward inflexible habits at the expense of flexible goal seeking, plus anhedonic-like reward deficits. Behavioral phenomena were accompanied by dendritic spine over-abundance and also neuronal hyper-excitability in the ventromedial PFC (vmPFC), which was necessary for the expression of isolation-induced habits and sufficient to trigger behavioral inflexibility in socially reared controls. Isolation hyper-activated cytoskeletal regulatory pathways, such that suppression of constituent elements – which are “druggable” in humans – during adolescence conferred resilience to isolation. Thus, adolescence is a critical period during which social experiences mold the structural, functional, and molecular maturation of PFC systems controlling action and mood.