Christina Ruby Email & Phone Number

I am an Associate Professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. My lab studies the effects of drugs of abuse and stress on circadian rhythm regulation in mice and investigates addiction-related behavior in planarians. Ultimately, I would like to see the basic research conducted in my lab advance treatments for alcohol and substance use disorders, sleep and circadian rhythm problems, and mood-related neuropsychiatric disorders.As a Postdoctoral Fellow at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota in the lab of Dr. Doo-Sup Choi, I studied the complex interaction between genetic and environmental influences underlying the development of alcoholism. The main focus of my fellowship was the role of astrocytes in adenosine-regulated glutamate signaling in the striatum using the ENT1 knockout mouse model of alcoholism. As a Graduate Student, I worked in the lab of Dr. J. David Glass at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. There, I learned many of the complex in vivo surgical and behavioral techniques used to study mammalian circadian timing, many of which I use in my current work at Mayo Clinic. My project in the Glass lab involved charactering the effects of alcohol on circadian behavioral rhythms and exploring the impact of disrupted circadian rhythmicity on alcohol consumption in rodent models.Expertise: Science writing and presentationLab Skills: in vivo microdialysis, stereotaxic surgery, circadian activity measurement and analysis, tissue isolation, sectioning and staining, animal handling and husbandry, open field activity monitoring, rotarod, iTRAQ protein labeling/proteomics, cell culture, quantitative PCR, immunohistochemistrySoftware Skills: MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Adobe Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop; Graphpad Prism, SigmaPlot, ClockLab/Actimetrics