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Erdem Karatekin, PhD

Faculty Member

Center for Neurodevelopment and Plasticity

Email | Lab | Department | ORCID

Cell membrane dynamics and cellular function

Stress, an inescapable part of daily life, can profoundly influence what we learn and remember; these memories, in turn, are essential to how we act in the future. My lab investigates why we remember certain parts of our experiences, how stress and affect influence these memories, and how what we remember guides our behavior. Our research is inspired by the understanding that experiences can be broken down into different type of memories – such as integrated contexts, conditioned associations, and automatic habits – each supported by a distinct neural system with its own potential to dynamically interact with stress and promote adaptive (and maladaptive) behavior. Our interdisciplinary approach draws on translational stress neurobiology and the cognitive neuroscience of memory, leveraging techniques including novel behavioral tasks, neuroendocrine assays, psychophysiology, advanced functional neuroimaging (fMRI), machine learning, computational modeling, clinical populations, and real-world behavioral monitoring. By identify determining the conditions under which stress modulates memories and how memory biases drive behavior, our work will provide a neurocognitive framework for resilience and interventions that can benefit memory in humans.

Biography

After studying chemical engineering at the U. of Louisville thanks to a swimming scholarship, I did a Ph.D. in soft-matter physics and photochemistry at Columbia University with N. J. Turro and B. O'Shaughnessy, studying polymers and polymerization reactions (1994-1999). During my post-doctoral work with F. Brochard-Wyart at the Curie Institute in Paris, I learned about lipid membranes and studied transient pores in giant vesicles (2000-2002). As a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) investigator at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique (IBPC, Paris), I studied secretory vesicle dynamics in live neuroendocrine cells using advanced microscopy and quantitative image analysis, and developed a single-vesicle microfluidic assay for a minimalistic reconstitution of exocytotic membrane fusion. Following an extended visit to the laboratory of J.E. Rothman at Yale while on leave from the CNRS, I joined the Department of C&M Physiology and the Nanobiology Institute in 2012.