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个人简介
I established my team at ICVS/School of Medicine, University of Minho, Portugal with a competitive FCT Investigator position in December 2013, after obtaining international experience in some leading laboratories in the US and Europe (Holland, Portugal, Italy and Finland).
Lab site: https://reward-aversion.org
My research is focused in unravelling how our brain encodes rewarding and aversive events to drive motivated behaviors.
How do our brains compute that a stimulus is “good” or “bad”? How is valence represented in the mammalian brain? What are the neural substrates underlying a rewarding or an aversive experience? What lies between the stimulus and the behavioural response?
On top of these exciting fundamental neuroscience questions, I am also exploring how early life stress in specific developmental windows can imprint long-lasting marks in these processes, leading to maladaptive behaviours (depression, addiction).
In the last years, my team has been allying fundamental with clinical research, combining rodent and human data, using a variety of techniques to find mechanistic explanations on how reward and aversion are encoded in the mammalian brain (rodents - in vivo electrophysiology, optogenetics, calcium imaging, behavioral evaluation; humans – fMRI, neuropsychological evaluation).
Currently, I am a Team leader and Assistant Professor at ICVS/School of Medicine, University of Minho, Portugal. In addition, I am the Science Outreach Coordinator of host institution, responsible for science dissemination and health literacy promotion for the society.
Major scientific contributions
1. Soares-Cunha (2016) Nat Commun – this was the first study to show that NAc D2-MSNs played an important role in positive reinforcement, challenging the classical model of opposing striatal function.
2. Soares-Cunha (2019) Mol Psychiatry – a seminal contribution demonstrating that NAc D1- and D2-MSNs can bi-directionally drive reward and aversion, depending on their pattern of neuronal activity.
3. Coimbra (2019) Nat Commun - Nature Communications Editors’ Highlight. This work identified a new source of cholinergic modulation in the NAc arising from the laterodorsal tegmentum (LDT), and showed for the first time that LDT-NAc projections modulated reward-related behaviors.
Background
I graduated in Applied Biology in 2003, with the research trainee at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), Holland (Dorien Peters’ Lab). From 2004 - 2008, I did my PhD at University of Minho, Portugal (Patricia Maciel’s Lab) and at David Geffen School of Medicine - UCLA, USA (Dan Geschwind’s lab). I characterized the first knockout animal model (C. elegans) for ataxin-3, the protein involved in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3. I identified several molecular interactors of this protein and showed that ataxin-3 is important for cytoskeletal organization. In 2009, I started a post-doctoral position at ICVS (Nuno Sousa’s lab), where we showed that early life stress induces long-term epigenetic changes in dopamine receptor D2 in the rodent striatum, with significant impact in emotional behavior.
Personal life
From very early age I loved to ask questions and discover new things. Now I am the mother of an inquisitive 6-year-old girl, that is asking as many questions as me, some not even science can answer. I love animals, to travel, I am always curious to meet new people, cultures, and to try new foods.
研究兴趣
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Catarina Deseyve,Ana Verónica Domingues, Tawan T. A. Carvalho, Gisela Armada,Raquel Correia,Natacha Vieitas‐Gaspar, Marcelina Wezik,Luísa Pinto,Nuno Sousa,Bárbara Coimbra,Ana João Rodrigues,Carina Soares‐Cunha
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PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINOLOGY (2024): 106955-106955
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NUTRITIONAL NEUROSCIENCEpp.1-19, (2024)
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (2024): 105702-105702
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