Erin Calipari is a professor at the Vanderbilt University of Medicine. Coach John Calipari's daughter is an acclaimed researcher in neurons.
As a Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research, Calipari joined Vanderbilt University in 2017. She studies how reward, associative learning, and motivation, all neural mechanisms that can be either adaptive or maladaptive, are connected to psychiatric illness. There are more opioid prescriptions written in Tennessee, where Calipari grew up, than there are residents.
Erin Calipari, Coach John Calipari Daughter Is A Professor
John Calipari, the lead coach of Kentucky's basketball team, adores his older daughter's homemade spaghetti and her desire to pursue a career in science.
And when she made the trip to the University of Kentucky campus last month to give a presentation about her addiction research, he was eager to meet her finally. Recently, Erin Calipari, an assistant professor in the Vanderbilt University Department of Pharmacology, paid a visit to the University of Kentucky to speak about her study on addiction.
Before giving her presentation, the neuroscientist spoke with faculty members and students at the UK Department of Biology. UKNow spoke with Calipari to get her opinion on the UK's emphasis on combating the opiate issue. The UK is a pioneer in the study of opiate addiction, she said. According to Calipari, "The UK is one of the major sites for this kind of illegal powder addiction work."
"And one of the nicer things is that the UK has a reputation in sports, which offers these researchers a platform to interact with individuals they otherwise wouldn't be able to." Therefore, connecting the university's reputation with researchers who change the community is a tremendously effective area.
She became upset because people only recognized her as the coach's daughter when she was young. However, she now accepts that she is the daughter of a guy who is the head of one of the top college athletic teams in the country. She sees it as a forum for communicating significant scientific discoveries to those who would not otherwise be interested.
Erin Calipari Is Doing Wonders In Research
Calipari researched how self-administered medications affected dopaminergic function to fuel addictive behaviors while working in Sara Jones' lab at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, where she earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2013.
During her postdoctoral studies with Eric Nestler at the School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, she used circuit probing techniques to comprehend the temporally distinct brain signals underlying motivation and reward learning. Her research aims to identify and alter the precise neural circuits in the brain that underpin both healthy and unhealthy processes in motivation, reward, and associative learning.
Recent studies by Calipari examined the relationship between immune system components and desires for food, sweets, and even illegal powders.
Her research on the molecular dysregulations that drive maladaptation has completely clarified how The capacity to link pleasant and negative stimuli with clues that foretell their occurrence is one of the best fundamental forms of learning. The ability to seek out pleasurable and avoid unpleasant stimuli is essential to survival and has been retained across species via evolution. Organisms do this by giving value to the signs that foretell these events, but dysregulation of these processes can lead to various psychiatric illness states.
Dysregulation of associative learning is one of many illnesses, including addiction, sadness, and anxiety. These neuropsychiatric illnesses are some of the most common and are very comorbid. Consequently, comprehending the brain mechanisms underlying associative learning has broad ramifications for creating therapeutic strategies for mental illness. To understand the circuit and molecular dysregulation that causes these disorders.
Her research attempts to integrate cutting-edge technologies with thorough models of psychiatric disease.
