Sasha Gibbs, PhD - Postdoctoral Fellow

Sasha Gibbs received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2004. There she studied the influence of dopaminergic drugs on working memory using fMRI. She is interested in how biological factors like genetic differences and stress reactivity affect the ways we pay attention to and remember information. One such genotype is the COMT val/met polymorphism, which affects dopamine metabolism in the brain. Individuals with particular variants of this polymorphism may be at increased risk for anxiety and mood disturbance but the mechanisms underlying these risks are poorly understood. Her current research examines how genotypes regulating dopamine and serotonin influence information processing and emotion regulation.