Zachary Pennington
PhD (UCLA)
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, UBC
Full Member
Dr. Pennington is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and a member of the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. His research utilizes innovative approaches to record and manipulate neural circuits in order to define their roles in stress, emotion, and learning.
He received his PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience from UCLA in the laboratory of Michael Fanselow, studying how stress and opioid use influence one another. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the laboratory of Denise Cai, where he used novel imaging technologies to advance our understanding of stress vulnerability.
Contact Info
2215 Wesbrook Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3
Research Information
Dr. Pennington’s lab is focused on uncovering how negative emotions are represented by brain circuitry and how these circuits are modified by experience. The long-term goal is to harness these discoveries to develop novel approaches for the treatment of anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions.
The lab utilizes a complementary set of methodologies to address these questions, including recording ongoing neuronal activity in freely behaving animals, manipulating the activity of discrete cell populations to test their function, and tagging cells activated by specific experiences in order to define their identity. These techniques are combined with principles of experimental psychology to connect brain activity with behaviour. The lab is also involved in various open-source software and hardware projects to help advance scientific discovery.
PublicationsKeywords
- neural circuits
- emotion
- memory
- stress
- anxiety
- fear
- PTSD
- mental health
- behaviour
- tool development