Kelvin Quinones-Laracuente, MD, PhD

I am a Puerto Rican, scientist, and a psychiatrist. Initially pursuing a combined MD/PhD training to be aware of current illnesses and further advance on their research. Behavioral diseases caught my attention as one of the fields with vast unknowns. Fortunately, for my graduate work, I trained with Dr. Greg Quirk, as he sharpened my scientific rigor, logic, and understanding of behavioral science. With Greg, I researched fear learning and memory using extracellular in vivo neural recordings. For residency, I wanted an intense and diverse exposure of psychiatric symptoms. I currently treat patients with a wide range of psychiatric illnesses, and I have noticed several overlapping symptoms across disorders that affect social function. This drove me to delve into the neural basis of interacting with others, melding my research training with my clinical experiences. Now in the lab of Dr. Robert Froemke, I model social scenarios with mice. These models allow us to examine neural circuitry with electrophysiology and optogenetics while one animal observes another. Understanding the neural circuitry and social brain pathways will yield new insights on how to better diagnose, treat, and prevent a wide range of psychiatric illness. My long-term plan includes becoming an independent researcher in academia and train the next generation of neuroscientists, particularly the underrepresented in science.

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