Hey, you've landed at the PBNJ Lab webpage! No, it's not peanut butter and jelly, . . . it's Physiological and Behavioral Neuroscience in Juveniles, of course!

We study the amazing (and related) processes of brain and cognitive development. Mammals are born with incomplete brains. Most of the neurons are there at birth, but they're not all wired together properly. So, we're looking at how this wiring process takes place and how it regulates the developmental emergence of memory. Since your brain has billions of neurons and these neurons can make thousands of connections with each other, the final maturation process is incredibly complex. As such, we look at slightly more simple models, like mice and rats, and try to work out rules that govern synaptic maturation and how they regulate developmental improvements in memory.

The brains of mice and rats mature in a very similar manner to human brains. They are built from the bottom up and mushroom out at the top, with the top structures being the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. These top structures are responsible for your ability to perceive and remember events in your life. We study, primarily, hippocampal development around the time when hippocampal-dependent learning and memory abilities become evident in the animal's behavior, at the end of the third postnatal week (comparable to 2-4 year old humans).

We also study memory in adult rats in collaboration with other labs in-house
Blackwell lab — http://www.gmu.edu/departments/krasnow/CENlab/
Ascoli lab — http://krasnow.gmu.edu/cn3/ascoli/

other departments at GMU
Thomspon lab — http://archlab.gmu.edu/people/jthompsz/
Parasuraman lab — http://archlab.gmu.edu/people/rparasur/

and other universities
Sapolsky lab — http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Robert_Sapolsky/

and in transgenic mice that we have engineered in our lab and in collaboration with other universities
Kentros Lab, UOregon — http://www.neuro.uoregon.edu/ionmain/htdocs/faculty/kentros.html