Dr. Moriel Zelikowsky
Assistant professor Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, University of Utah
Postdoctoral Fellow California Institute of Technology
PhD in Psychology University of California Los Angeles
When Dr. Moriel Zelikowsky began her freshman year at UCLA, she wanted to study film. Eventually, however, she gravitated towards philosophy; she loved thinking critically about the big questions at the heart of the human condition. She was especially interested in metaphysics, in questions such as “what is pain?” and “what is cognition?” But towards the end of her bachelor’s degree in philosophy, Moriel couldn’t shake the feeling that she wanted to explore these metaphysical questions in a more concrete way. Today, Moriel is an assistant professor at the University of Utah, where her lab focuses on the neural circuits underlying stress, fear, and social behavior. While in some ways her current field of study is far removed from her undergraduate major, Moriel believes her philosophy training still influences how she thinks as a scientist: she always critically examines the big-picture questions before diving into the experimental details.
After graduating with her B.A. in philosophy, Moriel stayed at UCLA to do a PhD in psychology, as she thought experimental psychology might allow her to answer big, philosophical questions in a more direct, hands-on way. In the years since, this initial interest in the mind and behavior has developed into a passion for circuits-based neuroscience. As a PhD student, Moriel joined the lab of Dr. Michael Fanselow. Her thesis focused on the circuitry underlying context-sensitive learning, specifically hippocampal encoding of contextual cues in the processes of fear extinction and renewal. She further examined the interplay between the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex in fear-based learning and behavior.
In addition to her scientific discoveries during graduate school, Moriel also took action to increase gender parity in the field. As a student, she loved attending the Pavlovian Society conference but noticed that year after year, the vast majority of the speakers were male. She organized a conference luncheon during which an invited speaker would give an informal talk on her experiences as a woman in the field. The same speaker would then also give a scientific talk as part of the meeting. Moriel found it extremely rewarding to see that often a majority of the luncheon attendees were men, signifying that gender bias in academia was something that a large community of scientists wanted to understand and address. Moriel’s idea has taken off, and what began as a conference luncheon is now a non-profit organization called Women in Learning, whose mission is to connect young women trainees in the broad fields of learning, behavior, and memory with the trailblazing women who have come before them.
After earning her doctoral degree, Moriel moved to the lab of Dr. David Anderson at Caltech for her postdoctoral fellowship, where she continued to build on her PhD work. The Anderson lab studies aggression and mating behavior, and Moriel wanted to understand how certain circumstances can generate both fear and aggression. She found that social isolation – known to cause increased aggression – also alters fear circuitry. Moriel discovered that a particular neuropeptide, Tac2, is increased in several brain regions after social isolation and drives several different behavioral consequences of isolation, including enhanced aggression in mice. Moriel is keenly aware of the implications that her research has for the punitive practice of solitary confinement. Her work clearly suggests that solitary confinement is a paradoxical punishment for violent prisoners – social isolation likely increases their aggressive behavior. Moriel’s work has also become extraordinarily relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic is causing widespread chronic stress from social isolation. She hopes that the new spotlight on her subfield will raise general awareness for the importance of social interaction and the counter-productive cruelty of solitary confinement.
Today, in her own lab, Moriel is continuing her work on social isolation and incorporating some work on trauma-induced fear and aggression that she started during her postdoc. She also has exciting new data on how social isolation affects mating behavior. Specifically, male mice usually sing a courting call to females, much like birds do. After social isolation, the male mice’s mating vocalizations have a diminished dynamic range and result in less successful wooing of the female. She is also studying female aggression, a phenomenon often studied in the context of maternal behavior, such as a female fighting off a threat to her pups. However, Moriel is taking a different approach and is studying females using the same paradigms normally used to study aggression in males. While it’s true that female mice do not attack and bite each other to the extent that male mice do (and therefore are often not used in such behavioral assays), they do still display small but measurable acts of aggression and dominance assertion. Thus not only is Moriel actively making the field a more welcome place for women scientists, she is also making sure that her research on fear and aggression circuitry is applicable across sexes.
While Moriel is excited about the experiments and big questions she is tackling in her lab, when asked about her vision for the next five or ten years, Moriel laughs. “I’ve never been much of a long-term planner” she says, and she believes this mindset has been instrumental in combating stress in the academic environment. Moriel explains that focusing on current projects provides a motivation to pursue big scientific questions without the stressful pressures imposed by the tenure-track pipeline. While she prefers to follow the science as it develops, Moriel does have a dream for the type of lab community that she will foster. When she was a graduate student, Moriel spent some time in a lab in Australia on an NSF travel award. Her new labmates would put in a hard day of work, grab some drinks in the evening, and then be up at 4am to go for a run. This routine – which she came to love – impressed upon Moriel the importance of balancing lab work with emotional and physical health. She wants her future trainees to have fulfilling lives outside of the lab so that they can be focused and motivated when at work.
As for creating her own balance, Moriel is a mother and an avid rock climber. She discovered rock climbing at the end of graduate school and feels incredibly empowered not only by the intellectual and physical challenge of it, but also by the group of strong, smart women that she often climbs with. She finds that planning her route up a particular rock is not unlike planning a set of experiments to answer a particular question. Undoubtedly, in the coming years, Moriel will continue to reach new summits, both of rock faces and in understanding the neural circuitry of social behavior.
Find out more about Moriel’s fascinating research here.
Check out Nancy’s interview with Moriel below or wherever you get your podcasts!
