2023
March
Congratulations to Ivy Hoang, Joseph Munier, Anna Verghese, Zara Greer, Sam Millard, lauren DiFazio, Courtney Sercander, Alicia Izquierdo, Melissa Sharpe for their manuscript titled: “A novel hypothalamic-midbrain circuit for model-based learning”, which is in review and has been posted on bioRxiv! Read it here.
2022
December
Big news for the Sharpe Lab! We are moving to the Psychology department at the University of Sydney in July 2023! Find out more about our new home here. We will be recruiting more postdocs and technicians in 2024. Get in touch if you’re interested in joining the lab.
September
Congrats to Sam Millard, Ivy Hoang, Zara Greer, Shayna O’Connor, Kate Wassum, Morgan James, David Barker, and Melissa Sharpe for their manuscript titled: “The cognitive basis of intracranial self-stimulation of midbrain dopamine neurons”, in review and available on bioRxiv, here.
Congrats to the Sharpe Lab for their first R01 from NIH/NIDA titled: “The Role of the Lateral Hypothalamus in the Balance of Learning and Behavior Towards Relevant Stimuli”!
August
Congratulations to Ben Seitz, Ivy Hoang, Aaron Blaisdell, and Mel Sharpe for publishing their paper, “Dopamine errors drive excitatory and inhibitory components of backward conditioning in an outcome-specific manner”, in Current Biology! PDF.
March
Congratulations to the Sharpe Lab for receiving an R21 awarded from NIMH for their project: “Investigating the recruitment of lateral hypothalamic circuits for the encoding of fear memories following experience with reward learning”.
Congratulations to Melissa Sharpe for receiving the prestigious NSF CAREER award entitled: “Reward learning shapes the fear circuit”.
January
Congratulations to Ben Seitz, Ivy Hoang, Aaron Blaisdell, and Mel Sharpe for posting the labs first experimental paper on bioRxiv: “Learning in reverse: Dopamine errors drive excitatory and inhibitory components of backward conditioning in an outcome-specific manner”, find it here.
2021
October
The Sharpe Lab just went to their first in-person conference: The Pavlovian Society! And Lauren DiFazio won the poster award for her work titled: “The temporal dynamics of encoding fear memories in the BLA and how the role of the BLA changes with reward learning experience”! Congratulations!
September
Congratulations to Lauren DiFazio, Michael Fanselow, and Melissa Sharpe, for their paper titled: “The effect of stress and reward on future encoding of fear memories”, to be published in Behavioral Brain Research!
Congratulations to Sam Millard, Carrie Bearden, Katie Karlsgodt, and Melissa Sharpe, for their paper titled: “The prediction-error hypothesis of schizophrenia: New data point to circuit-specific changes in dopamine activity”, to be published in Neuropsychopharmacology!
Congratulations to Ben Seitz, Aaron Blaisdell, and Melissa Sharpe, on their paper titled: “Higher-order cognition and dopamine: charting a path forward”, in press at Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience!
August
Congratulations to the Sharpe Lab for receiving the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Grant!
July
Congrats to Ivy Hoang for being selected to the NIDA-funded T32 (Translational Neuroscience on Drug Abuse) fellowship!
Congrats to Melissa Sharpe for receiving the UCLA Hellman Fellow Award!
May
Congrats to Ivy Hoang and Melissa Sharpe on their paper titled, “The basolateral amygdala and lateral hypothalamus bias learning towards motivationally significant events”, published in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.
April
Congrats to Melissa Sharpe on her paper titled, “Past Experience Shapes the Neural Circuits Recruited for Future Learning”, published in Nature Neuroscience.
2020
November
Way to go Ivy Hoang for being selected for the UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship (GSRM) fellowship, the UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship (GRM) fellowship, and the NIDA-funded T32 (Translational Neuroscience of Drug Abuse, TNDA) fellowship!
Welcome to the lab Lauren DiFazio! She has officially joined our lab as a 1st year BNS Ph.D. student!
Congrats to Lauren DiFazio for being selected for the Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award (UCLA Graduate Division) fellowship!
Congrats to Lauren DiFazio on her paper titled, “Optogenetic stimulation of the basolateral amygdala accelerates acquisition of object-context associations” in collaboration with David Reis and Joseph Manns, which is soon to be published in Behavioral Neuroscience!
Congrats to Dr. Sam Millard on his recent paper titled, “The effects of perinatal fluoxetine exposure on emotionality behaviors and cortical and hippocampal glutamatergic receptors in female Sprague-Dawley and Wistar-Kyoto rats”, soon to be published in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry!