Roger L Clem
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Neuroscience
After a frightening experience, the brain stores a fear memory tied to the place where it happened. Returning to that place many times without harm can lead to extinction, which creates a new safety memory that competes with the fear memory.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
fear extinction
fear memory
fear conditioning
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Test whether somatostatin interneurons in the ventral hippocampus are recruited during recall of extinguished context fear, using intersectional genetics and calcium imaging to monitor distinct groups of these cells.
- Determine whether these interneurons control switching between high- and low-fear states, using optogenetics to turn the cells on or off during behavior.
- Define how somatostatin interneurons shape the activity of excitatory neuron populations that encode competing fear and extinction memories, using electrophysiology and imaging.
More about the research
In disorders of pathological fear, the safety memory often fails to win when the place is encountered again. How the brain chooses between these conflicting memories is largely unknown. This gap limits understanding of why extinction fails and how fear can return.
Why it matters
Knowing which brain circuits favor safety memories over fear memories could improve understanding of recovery from trauma. It could also help guide treatments that prevent pathological fear from returning after behavioral therapy, which is relevant to people with fear-related psychiatric disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christa McIntyre
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Neuroscience
Test in rats whether pairing exposure with vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) produces fear extinction memories that last longer and generalize to related cues, compared with exposure alone.
Jun-Hyeong Cho
University of California-Riverside, CA·Neuroscience
Determine how contextual fear memory is encoded through synaptic strengthening in the hippocampus–amygdala pathway, combining engram cell labeling, optogenetics and electrophysiology.
Sydney Trask
Indiana University, IN·Neuroscience
Compare UCS deflation, presenting weaker versions of a feared stimulus, with standard extinction in renewal, spontaneous recovery and reinstatement tests, predicting that only deflation reduces all three forms of fear relapse.
The school
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai: 45 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 62 research doctorates a year.
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