Joseph L. Nuñez

Research Interests

The primary interest of my laboratory involves understanding the spectrum of events (from the cellular to behavioral level) resulting from early brain injury. The neonatal brain is especially susceptible to insult due to hypoxia-ischemia, prenatal drugs of abuse and anesthetic exposure. These traumatic events/agents lead to cognitive and behavioral dysfunction. Using these model systems, we have begun to address the following questions.

1 – What is the effect of genetic sex and neonatal steroid hormone environment on the response to early brain injury?

2 – What is the role of GABAA receptor activation and calcium influx via voltage sensitive calcium channels in early brain injury? How does this relate to normal brain development?

3 – We have documented damage to the hippocampus - what other regions of the brain are affected in our models of premature infant brain injury?

4 – What types of behavioral deficits result from early brain injury?

5 – Are there means of therapeutic neuroprotection or subsequent behavioral intervention (e.g. environmental enrichment) that can lessen the extent of damage?

My laboratory uses a variety of tools to address these questions: 1) calcium imaging of primary cultured hippocampal neurons, 2) cellular analysis using Western blot technique, 3) unbiased stereological investigation, and 4) behavioral analysis (Morris water maze, radial arm maze, novel object recognition task, elevated plus maze).

Feel free to contact me regarding my research.

Selected Publications

Search all publications in the NCBI Journal Database

Rothstein, S., Simkins, T., Nuñez, J.L. (2008) Response to neonatal anesthesia – effect of sex on anatomical and behavioral outcome. Neuroscience, In press.

Nuñez, J.L., Yang, Z., Jiang, Y., Grandys, T., Mark, I., Levison, S.W. (2007) 17β-Estradiol protects the neonatal brain from hypoxia-ischemia. Experimental Neurology 208: 269-276.

Nuñez, J.L., McCarthy, M.M. (2007) Evidence for an extended duration of GABA-mediated excitation in the developing male versus female hippocampus. Developmental Neurobiology 67: 1879-1890.