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Ki Ann Goosens uses interdisciplinary approaches to study the neural mechanisms of learning and memory and to identify novel therapeutic targets for anxiety and stress related disorders. Combining neural recordings with new molecular techniques, she investigates how learned fear changes the brain's pathways and links those changes to behavior and brain chemistry. She has shown that chronic stress increases learned fear, and has identified several novel genes and molecules that contribute to this effect. She uses viral-mediated gene transfer and RNA interference as tools for probing the function of specific these genes and molecules. She is also studying the relationship between stress and inflammation in these pathways. She hopes her work will lead to novel drug interventions for fear and anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress syndrome and phobias.
Ki Ann Goosens joined the McGovern Institute at MIT as a Principal Investigator in the fall of 2006 after completing her post-doctoral research with Dr. Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She received a Ph.D. in Biopsychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2002, where she earned awards for the most outstanding dissertation and for outstanding undergraduate teaching. While there, she was the first and only student in any psychology program to receive a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellowship in the Biological Sciences. She received a B.A. with Distinction in Cognitive Science with a Concentration in Neuroscience from the University of Virginia, where she was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Apprentice, in 1995.
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