University of Illinois (1993)
Associate Professor, Biological Psychology
Office Hours: Flexible, by appointment
Phone Number: (631) 632-7821
e-mail: Brenda.Anderson@stonybrook.edu
Website: http://www.psychology.stonybrook.edu/banderson-/
Areas of Interest:
Exercise, Stress, Anatomical plasticity, Quantitative neuroanatomy
Current Research:
Brenda Anderson's laboratory studies how environmental experience and hormones influence brain structure, and how structural changes in turn influence behavior and subsequent experience. She is currently studying synapse loss following chronic elevations of plasma glucocorticoids, hormones that are elevated in a number of neurological disorders. She is particularly interested in how synapse loss is reflected by structural volume loss in order to better understand the structural volume reductions reported in human populations with Cushing's disease and depression. Additionally, she is interested in whether exercise can reduce neuronal vulnerability to damage and spare behavior.
Representative Publications:
Coburn-Litvak, P. S., Tata, D. A., Gorby, H. E., Richardson, G., McCloskey, D. P., and Anderson, B. J. (2004). Chronic corticosterone reduces brain weight, and mitochondrial, but not glial volume fraction in area CA3, Neuroscience,124, 429-438.
Coburn-Litvak, P. S., Pothakos, K., Tata, D. A., McCloskey, D. P., and Anderson, B. J., (2003). Chronic administration of corticosterone impairs spatial reference memory before spatial working memory in rats, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 80, 11-23.
McCloskey, D. P., Adamo, D. S., Anderson, B. J. (2001). Exercise increases metabolic capacity in the motor cortex and striatum, but not in the hippocampus. Brain Research, 891, 168-175.
Anderson, B. J., Rapp, D. N., Baek, D. H., McCloskey, D. P., Coburn-Litvak, P. S., and Robinson, J. K. (2000) Exercise influences spatial learning in the radial arm maze. Physiology and Behavior, 70, 425-429.
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