Michael Drew

The major aim of our lab is to understand how the brain forms memories of our experiences, how these memories are retrieved at the right time and place, and how maladaptive memories can be suppressed. We focus on the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is specialized for rapidly generating detailed, multimodal memories of our experiences, called episodic memories. We study hippocampal function in mice because of the availability of genetic tools that give us the ability to manipulate neurons and neural circuits with unprecedented precision. Our specific interests include acquisition and extinction of fear memories and adult hippocampal neurogenesis.