Dr. Erica Rodriguez
Postdoctoral Fellow Columbia University
PhD Duke University, Neurobiology
Dr. Erica Rodriguez’s current fascination with the intersection of emotions and social environment was inspired by her own experience with chronic back pain; she found that the pain dissipated when she was around loved ones and in comfortable social situations, suggesting that social context could shape her perception of her emotional state. As a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Daniel Salzman’s lab at Columbia University, Erica studies the neural circuitry underlying emotions and social decisions in rodents.
Erica developed an interest in biology at a young age, and narrowed in on neuroscience when she took AP Psychology in high school and learned she could combine her interest in biology with her interest in behavior. She made sure to only apply to colleges that had a neuroscience major or at least a focus on neuroscience. She enrolled in the Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. She entered her first year of college intending not only to study neuroscience but also to apply to medical school. She joined the lab of Dr. Carolyn Pytte, who studies neurogenesis in songbirds and how this plays a role in vocal communication and learning. Through this experience as a NIH MARC U-STAR fellow, Erica found she really enjoyed doing science; she decided that instead of going to medical school, she wanted to pursue a PhD.
She applied for and was accepted to the PhD program in Neurobiology at Duke University and was initially interested in continuing her work on songbirds. During her first rotation in a songbird lab she learned several electrophysiology techniques. However, she realized that she could answer the kinds of questions she was interested in in other animal models as well and didn’t need to limit herself to songbirds. For her second rotation she chose a lab that studied neurogenesis in mice. She was excited to discover the expansive array of tools available to researchers working with the mouse model that were unavailable for the songbird model at the time, and so she decided to join that lab for her PhD.
However, Erica soon found that the mentoring and overall environment in that lab weren’t a good fit, and so she decided to switch labs. This experience led to low confidence and self-esteem, and she didn’t talk to anyone about how she was feeling. When Erica began rotating in labs again after leaving her first lab, these feelings presented as if she wasn’t interested in science, leading to friction with her rotation PI. She was asked to leave the lab, which did not help with her low confidence. She went to the office of Dr. Fan Wang, an unofficial mentor, and cried, feeling like she had nowhere to go. Erica asked if Fan would be willing to accept her as a PhD student. Fan said that she would of course be happy to have Erica in her lab. Finally Erica had found a home in which to conduct her PhD research.
As an NIH NRSA F31 Diversity predoctoral fellow in Fan’s lab, Erica studied the neural circuitry underlying the perception of emotions, specifically pain. In particular, she studied how facial pain is perceived more strongly than bodily pain. She found a direct monosynaptic connection between cranial sensory neurons and neurons in the lateral parabrachial nucleus that respond to pain. When she activated this connection using optogenetics, the mice exhibited affective behaviors that suggested they were experiencing pain, whereas when she inactivated this connection, it reduced facial nociception. She found that facial stimuli thus led to more robust activation of the neurons in the lateral parabrachial nucleus involved in perceiving pain, suggesting that this monosynaptic connection provides a mechanism for why facial pain is perceived more strongly than bodily pain. This finding was published in Nature Neuroscience.
Coming out of her PhD, Erica wanted to continue studying how we perceive emotions. However, for her postdoc she wanted to understand how our social environment influences how we experience emotions. This led her to the lab of Dr. Daniel Salzman for her post-doctoral fellowship as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow. Daniel’s lab studies how the amygdala and limbic regions are involved in emotional processing.
For her postdoc, Erica asks how mice make decisions about approach and avoidance when they experience socially-relevant sensory cues. She began by determining the social rank of each of her mice, and then presented a middle-rank mouse with urine from either a dominant or submissive mouse. She looked at which scent the middle-rank mouse preferred (or spent more time interacting with). She found that males tended to interact more with the dominant mouse odors over the submissive mouse odors, and females showed the opposite trend. To understand the role of different brain regions in this behavior, she silenced neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that project to the basolateral amygdala (BLA), as these brain regions play a role in learning and social perception. She found that silencing these BLA-projecting ACC neurons disrupted the mouse’s preference for dominant versus submissive odors in both sexes of mice. Now, Erica is looking at how neural activity could encode this preference in the ACC-BLA circuit, and what the role of neuromodulators could be in shaping this circuit and behavior.
For her next steps, Erica received a NIH MOSAIC K99/R00 which helps provide transitional funding for postdocs from diverse backgrounds to become faculty. Once she starts her own lab, Erica hopes to branch into understanding how sensory perception helps drive the emotional responses and social learning behaviors she has been studying in her postdoc. She also hopes to delve more into the role of neuromodulators in shaping socially driven emotional behavior. Finally, she’s interested in studying how these socially driven emotional behaviors and their underlying circuitry change in mouse models of neuropsychiatric disease.
As she thinks about starting her own lab, Erica is considering the mentorship strategy she wants to adopt. She emphasizes the importance of making a roadmap and helping each trainee pursue their own individual goals. Furthermore, hoping to give back to the scientific community and make it more inclusive, Erica has also helped create the ZIPSx symposium, an external postdoc symposium series at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. For this symposium, they seek out postdocs working at smaller institutions or departments, and bring them to Columbia, in the hopes of giving postdocs the chance to present their research and develop connections at a large research institution. Erica points to the role that DEI and outreach programs played in broadening her perspective in neuroscience and exposing her to more opportunities at every step of her training from her MARC undergraduate fellowship through her MOSAIC transition funding to opening her own lab. Unfortunately, awards from these instrumental programs, including her own MOSAIC K99/R00 award, are now being terminated. Regardless, Erica remains steadfast in participating in outreach and mentoring high school and undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds, with the hope of giving others the same chance through this and other programs.
Find out more about Erica and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Melissa’s full interview with Erica on January 27, 2025 below!
