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Merridee Lefner

@merridee.bsky.social
69 followers 88 following 2 posts

Postdoc studying the neurobiology of behavioral flexibility in the Moghaddam lab @OHSU 🧠 PhD from the Wanat lab @UTSA

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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Bita Moghaddam @bita137.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Please check out my futuristic opinion piece in @jamapsychiatry.com "specific treatments for schizophrenia that are tailored to target symptoms at different developmental stages are no longer the stuff of science fiction, but instead are realistic future goals" jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
jamanetwork.com
Updating Treatment Goals for Schizophrenia
This article discusses research providing renewed reasons to revisit the utility of glutamatergic drugs for treating schizophrenia.
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Matt Wanat @mattjwanat.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Check out the new preprint from the lab led by Brandon Garcia-Castañeda! Huge shout out to NIH/NIDA for initially funding this line of research and continuing to support this work in a new R21/R33 with @asoshnev.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
biorxiv.org
Ventral tegmental area astrocytes regulate drug-cue associations and drug intake
Cocaine use disorder remains a critical public health concern with limited treatment options. Astrocytes are increasingly recognized as active regulators of neurotransmission and are emerging as impor...
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Bita Moghaddam @bita137.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Our new study ⬇️inspired by the question: does psilocybin influence meta-learning and cortical processing of unexpected uncertainty? Why is this important? Meta-learning may be critical for therapeutic effects of psychedelics and how the trip creates a window that facilitates clinical intervention
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Bita Moghaddam @bita137.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Out today! A truly team effort and one of my favorite lab projects The findings connect NMDA/Grin2A malfunction to dopamine dynamics and related behaviors, and provide a futuristic model to develop and test "course altering" treatments for schizophrenia www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Grin2a knockout in adolescent dopamine neurons disrupts prediction error signaling and produces a phenotype relevant to schizophrenia - Molecular Psychiatry
Molecular Psychiatry - Grin2a knockout in adolescent dopamine neurons disrupts prediction error signaling and produces a phenotype relevant to schizophrenia
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Bita Moghaddam @bita137.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
Don't miss this if you are going to #SfN2025 and interested in cross-species psychedelic neuroscience research Looking forward to hearing the talks and the discussions, and excited about presenting some of the lab's unpublished data and how we are thinking about future research
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
European Behavioural Pharmacology Society @eurbehavpharm.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
Congratulations to this year's cohort of travel awardees. The committee had an incredibly hard job with over 100 applications! We look forward to seeing you all in Spain next month. Attendees, the data blitz highlighting the awardee's work is on Day 1 at 15:10. #EBPS2025
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Alicia Izquierdo @aliciaizquierdo.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...
latimes.com
Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism
The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Bita Moghaddam @bita137.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
New lab paper by @merridee.bsky.social identifying a novel role for VTA GABA neurons in behavioral flexibility GABA, but not dopamine, neuron activation correlates with behavior when cues unexpectedly shift from predicting punishment to predicting reward www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Flexible updating of reward and punishment contingencies by VTA GABA neurons
In dynamic environments where stimuli predicting reward or punishment unexpectedly change, it is critical to flexibly update behavior while preserving…
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Merridee Lefner @merridee.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
Yeah dopamine encodes reward but what about when contingencies shift and behavior needs to be flexible? Turns out VTA GABA neuron activity plays a role, check it out in my first postdoctoral research article here!👇
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Matt Wanat @mattjwanat.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Ever wonder how stress and the estrous cycle affects reward learning? Well we have answers for you in our paper led by @askaneuroscientist.bsky.social published in @npp-journal.bsky.social And huge thanks to the NIH and NSF who supported this research.
nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com
Estrous cycle stage gates the effect of stress on reward learning
Neuropsychopharmacology - Estrous cycle stage gates the effect of stress on reward learning
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Dr. Suzanne Le Menestrel @drsl.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants. www.spencer.org/grant_types/...
spencer.org
Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program
In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Gabriel Bosslet @gbosslet.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Well the NIH has cancelled the Women's Health Initiative, the largest study of women in history It has been running continuously since 1991 and has provided massive key knowledge about diseases in women Unreal www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
NIH cancels its first and largest study centered on women
The Women’s Health Initiative has produced numerous influential findings
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Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
Can confirm that my NSF grant "How False Beliefs Form & How to Correct Them" was cancelled today because it is "not in alignment with current NSF priorities" Shocking that understanding how people are misled by false information is now a forbidden topic. Our work will continue but at a smaller scale
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PombeDoc @pombedoc.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
The Atlantic story on the situation at NIH is sobering. We are so screwed. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...
theatlantic.com
Inside the Collapse at NIH
Administration officials pressured NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now.
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Reposted by Merridee Lefner
Roxana Daneshjou, MD, PhD @roxanadaneshjou.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
The NIH diversity supplement pages have all been pulled down. What is a diversity supplement and why should the public care? A diversity supplement is funding to help diversify the research workforce. You may be wondering, “so what?”. Let me explain. www.nigms.nih.gov/Pages/PageNo...
nigms.nih.gov
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
NIGMS supports basic research to understand biological processes and lay the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.
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Merridee Lefner @merridee.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
🙃🙃🙃
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