Dr. Danielle Gulick, M.Ed., PhD

Dr. Gulick has been studying alcohol addiction and its role in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases for the past 20 years.  She has been funded by NIAAA, the Alzheimer’s Association, VA, and Ed and Ethel Moore Foundation for this work.  Her lab has contributed pioneering work to the study of how adolescence alcohol exposure during times of circadian sleep disruption can alter the developmental trajectory of the executive, reward, and stress pathways of the brain.  She has expanded this work to examine how these same factors can predispose the brain to neurodegeneration through alterations in alcohol metabolism and oxidative stress.  In a second area of focus, a recent graduate student of Dr. Gulick, Heather Mahoney, completed pioneering work examining how environmental stressors such as circadian disruptions can contribute to the aberrant dendritic growth and synaptic pruning and gene x environment models of schizophrenia.  Dr. Gulick and her team are extending this work now to examine how the circadian clock functions in both microglia and neurons to alter synaptic connectivity and how circadian disruptions may also predispose to these systems to neurodegeneration and the psychotic symptoms that often manifest in Alzheimer’s disease.