Mae Guthman
She/Her
I am trans and I am a postdoc.//
I am a queer trans woman and neuroscientist. I am based and do my research in colonized Lenapehoking, the occupied territories of the Lenni Lenape. I’m interested in the parameter space underlying the dynamics in neural systems during social behaviors. I want to explore the question of “how do environmental conditions (e.g. resource availability, social hierarchy, social history, individual experience, etc.) influence animals to engage in social interactions?”. I want to study how this parameter space affects the neuronal activity encoding and driving these behaviors. In turn, how does this behavior drive changes in neurons to influence future behavior?
Hormones, like estrogens, affect the nervous system. The fascinating dance between neurohormones and their receptors endows them with the ability to dynamically regulate neuronal functioning. Through these interactions, neurohormones can control a neuron’s activity and drive plastic changes in neurons to alter their responding to on-going and future stimuli and inputs. The dynamic plasticity of neurons is a fundamental aspect of the nervous system broadly, and social behaviors in particular. These diverse and ever-changing patterns of neuronal activity and plasticity occur across various scales of neuronal organization from synapses to circuits to entire systems across the brain.