Topic: post-traumatic stress disorder

Matthew J. Girgenti discusses how research on individual brain cells and the three-dimensional organization of DNA is changing the biological understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. The seminar examines how these approaches reveal trauma-associated brain changes and identify possible targets for more effective, personalized treatments. Girgenti is a neuroscientist in Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. Jeffrey Borenstein moderates this Meet the Scientist session. Online via the BBRF Zoom webinar. Tuesday 13 October 2026, 14:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Follow Reg

Maladaptive emotional memories contribute to the persistence of numerous mental health disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Using rodent behavioural models of the psychological processes relevant to these disorders, it is possible to identify potential treatment targets for the development of new therapies, including those based upon disrupting the reconsolidation of maladaptive emotional memories. Using examples from rodent models relevant to multiple mental health disorders, this talk will consider some of the opp

50 years ago it was found that sleep somehow made memories better and more permanent, but neither sleep nor memory researchers knew enough about sleep and memory to devise robust, effective tests. Today the fields of sleep and memory have grown and what is now understood is astounding. Still, great mysteries remain. What is the functional difference between the subtly different slow oscillation vs the slow wave of sleep and do they really have opposite memory consolidation effects? How do short spindles (e.g. <0.5 s as in schizophrenia) differ in function from longer ones and are longer spindl

While many individuals experience traumatic events during their lifetimes, only some go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This susceptibility and resilience can be modelled in rodents using the stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL) procedure, in which rats are exposed to a session of massed, unpredictable footshocks and subsequently assessed on tasks of adaptive fear learning. It has previously been observed that subpopulations of rats are susceptible or resilient to showing the PTSD-like phenotype following SEFL, and that these rats show differences in glutamate receptor sub