Dan Christoffel
Postdoctoral Scholar
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Stanford University
United States of America
Biography
Dr. Dan Christoffel is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He attained Doctor of Philosphy from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Neuroscience in 2014. He says his long-term goals are to understand the distinct modes of plasticity present in different synaptic types, how these mechanisms encode experience to regulate behavior, and uncover what role they play in psychiatric disorders.
Research Interest
He is currently investigating specific circuits involved in reward and consummatory behaviors. Through synapse-specific modulation, He hopes to uncover how various glutamatergic inputs to the nucleus accumbens regulate behaviors involved in reward seeking.
Publications
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Steinberg, E. E., Christoffel, D. J., Deisseroth, K., Malenka, R. C. (2016) Illuminating circuitry relevant to psychiatric disorders with optogenetics CURRENT OPINION IN NEUROBIOLOGY 30: 9-16
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Christoffel DJ, Golden SA, Walsh JJ, Guise KG, Heshmati M, et al. (2015) Excitatory transmission at thalamo-striatal synapses mediates susceptibility to social stress. Nature neuroscience 18: 962-964
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Golden SA, Heshmati M, Flanigan M, Christoffel DJ, Guise K, et al. (2016) Basal forebrain projections to the lateral habenula modulate aggression reward. Nature 534: 688.
