Josh L. Plotkin
Assistant Professor
Neurobiology & Behavior
Stony Brook University
United States of America
Biography
Josh Plotkin received undergraduate degrees in Biology and Music from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He then attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received his PhD in Neuroscience. He was a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA and then at Northwestern University. He joined the faculty of Stony Brook University in 2015, where he is now an assistant professor in the department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and a member of the Center for Affective Neuroscience of Depression and Anxiety (CANDA).
Research Interest
Brain most intimately associated with this type of action selection and habit learning: the basal ganglia. The major input nucleus of the basal ganglia, the striatum, is charged with receiving massive amounts of information from wildly diverse parts of the brain. The striatum sorts and integrates this synaptic information and then passes it on to the output nuclei of the basal ganglia, which ultimately make a recommendation about which actions should be performed. How the striatum accomplishes this, and what goes awry in disease states.
Publications
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Plotkin, J.L. and Surmeier, D.J. (2014). Impaired striatal function in Huntington’s disease is due to aberrant p75NTR signaling. Rare Diseases. DOI 10.4161/2167549X.2014.968482.
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Fieblinger, T., Graves, S., Sebel, L., Alcacer, C., Plotkin, J.L., Gertler, T., Chan, C.S., Heiman, M., Greengard, P., Cenci, M.A. and Surmeier, D.J. (2014). Cell type-specific plasticity of striatal projection neurons in parkinsonism and L-DOPA-induced dyskinesia. Nature Communications. 5:5316.
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Plotkin, J.L. and Surmeier, D.J. (2015). Corticostriatal synaptic adaptations in Huntington’s disease. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 33:53-62.
