Johnson Lab
Principal Investigator: Zachary V Johnson
Institution: Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary The social environment has profound effects on organismal biology, including human health. Individuals vary in their physiological and behavioral responses to social stimuli, and this variation can manifest as difficulties in social perception, learning, and behavior in everyday life, or as increased risk for specific neuropsychiatric symptoms in response to social adversity. Previous work has focused predominantly on discovering the mechanisms of specific forms of social perception, learning, and behavior, but less attention has been devoted to understanding how these processes vary among individuals. This proposal leverages the strong genetic, neurobiological, and behavioral variation within prairie voles to investigate how integrated levels of biological organization generate individual variation in responses to social stimuli. Briefly, prairie voles exhibit a suite of unique social behaviors, including pair bonding, consoling, extensive alloparental and biparental care, and selective aggression toward opposite-sex conspecifics following pair bonding. These behaviors vary among individuals, and in some instances this behavioral variation has been linked to geneti…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM155357-03: Cellular, neurogenomic and neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying variation in social behavior (2026)
- 5R35GM155357-02: Cellular, neurogenomic and neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying variation in social behavior (2025)
- 1R35GM155357-01: Cellular, neurogenomic and neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying variation in social behavior (2024)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com