Moises Dos Santos Correa Email & Phone Number

I have been working as a researcher at Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC) since 2014, initially as an undergraduate researcher and then, from 2018 on, as a Ph.D. student. I was trained by Prof. Dr. Raquel Fornari in several behavioral, cellular and molecular neuroscience techniques, such as animal handling, contextual fear conditioning (CFC), blood sampling, ELISA, immunohistochemistry, and western blotting. My undergraduate project objective was to investigate how increasing contextual fear conditioning (CFC) training intensity would modulate corticosterone (CORT) levels during memory consolidation and contextual specificity over time. I was granted an undergraduate research fellowship by the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) In 2017 I was awarded a 3-month international undergraduate internship fellowship by FAPESP to work at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology under the supervision of Dr. Erika Atucha to learn stereotaxic surgery and viral infusion in mice. In 2018, I was awarded a full Ph.D. fellowship by FAPESP to earn my doctoral degree which is currently underway. My project consisted in further investigating the role of emotional arousal and stress in time-dependent fear generalization. My first objective was to investigate with immunohistochemistry the differences in neuronal activation in several key regions of interest in the brains of rats trained with increasing CFC training. My second objective was to investigate if systemic post-training injections of CORT after increasing CFC training intensities would change the temporal dynamics of contextual specificity. My third objective is to investigate the role played by Glucocorticoid Receptors (GRs) in consolidating ‘generalizable’ memory traces. Overall, my findings during the PhD suggest that contextual fear generalization is dependent on the level of emotional arousal during acquisition, corticosterone levels and activation of GRs during consolidation, and on the engagement of Salience Networks regions during remote memory retrieval.

Listed skills include Social Networking, Microsoft Word, Public Relations, Powerpoint, and 40 others.