Kristen Berendzen, MD, PhD

Research Description

We study the connection between aging biology and behavior. Our goal is to understand how the neural circuits underlying social behaviors in particular adapt to changing endocrine and genetic regulation in the setting of healthy aging and in disease. Many neuropsychiatric diseases emerge at specific developmental periods, with middle to late-age being a point of particular vulnerability. The changes to physiology and behavior that occur with age are mediated by altered reproductive and neuroendocrine signaling as well as specific genetic and molecular programs. We currently lack an understanding of how these age-related changes and developmental programs ultimately impact behavior. Social attachment behaviors are specific to individual species, responsive to environmental context and developmental stage, and are exquisitely sensitive to neuropsychiatric disease processes. We have developed model systems for understanding social attachment in neurodegenerative disease and with age. We primarily use prairie voles, rodents that displays long-term adult attachments, and apply approaches for behavioral phenotyping, transcriptomic profiling of specific neural populations, systems neuroscience, and molecular genetic techniques to manipulate genetic targets of interest in the vole to understand their role in attachment.

Current Projects

1. Defining the role of neuroendocrine systems in mediating age-related changes in social behavior.
2. Understanding how social isolation and social loss are encoded in the brain and the effects of these experiences on neural function and physiological health with age.
3. Examining mechanisms of vulnerability in the circuitry for social behavior to age-related disease.

Lab Members

-Denis Galo, Junior Specialist
-Michael Sherman, Staff Research Associate

Academic community service and committee membership: UCSF Women’s Physician-Scientist Member, UCSF Inclusive Research Mentor Training (completed 2022), SRTP host