MARIEKE GILMARTIN, PH.D.

Dr. Gilmartin received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Penn State College of Medicine in 2007 working in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew McEchron. She completed her post-doctoral training with Dr. Fred Helmstetter at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee prior to joining the faculty at Marquette University in 2013.

 

Dr. Gilmartin and her team study how fear memories are formed in the brain and how age and sex influence the neural circuits of memory. 

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Fear helps keep us safe.  Learning about threatening situations allows us to develop strategies to avoid or cope with potential harm in the future.  However, for some individuals, fearful memories born out of trauma can become debilitating, as in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and effective treatments remain elusive.  Thus there is a need to better understand 1) how fear memories are formed in the brain and 2) what changes in the brain lead to susceptibility or resilience to maladaptive fear memories. Moreover, women are twice as likely as men to develop fear and anxiety disorders but the neurobiological basis of this difference is unknown.   

 

We therefore use in vivo calcium imaging, unit recording, optogenetics, and molecular approaches in behaving rodents to determine how multiple brain areas interact to support learning, memory, and behavior.  We further examine how sex, stress, and age affects the strength and persistence of memory. 

 

Team members: 

• Doctoral Students: Grace Schamber, Lila Metko

• Undergraduates:  Sophie Elsdon, Monika Fafrowicz, Yousef Kahla, Kalliyen Kay, Collin Schlut, Isabella Vasser, Nora Voshell, Adam Warda, Morgan Williams

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Current Projects: 

 

• Hippocampal contributions to aversive learning and behavior

• Sex differences in brain circuits supporting fear learning 

• Effects of circulating sex hormones on neural encoding across aging and Alzheimer's