Hadley Bergstrom, Professor of Psychological Science and Director of Neuroscience and Behavior, received a new grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) for his research project titled “Differentiating fear generalization and extinction neuronal ensembles in prefrontal cortex.”

Funded through NIH’s Academic Research Enhancement Awards for Undergraduate-Focused Institutions (AREA) program, Hadley’s grant will support his ongoing study on fear overgeneralization, a key abnormality in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while also engaging undergraduates in advanced biomedical research.

PTSD affects almost 7% of U.S. adults and is associated with dysfunction in both extinction and generalization, which are key learning and memory processes that regulate fear responses. Hadley’s project addresses the question of whether these processes are mutually exclusive, or overlapping, in the prefrontal cortex.