Dr.  Gül  Dölen  is  a  Professor  and  the  Renee  and  Bob  Parsons  Endowed  chair  in  the  Department  of Psychology,  the  Helen  Wills  Neuroscience  Institute,  and  the  Berkeley  Center  for  the  Science  of Psychedelics  at  the  University  of  California,  Berkeley.  Additionally,  Dr.  Dölen  maintains  an  adjunct professorship in Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she previously served as an Assistant and Associate Professor. Dr. Dölen earned her M.D., Ph.D. at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Dr. Dölen is the recipient of several prestigious awards including: the Joukowsky Family Foundation Award, the Conquer Fragile X Rising Star Award, the Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Society for Social Neuroscience Early Career Award, the Searle Scholars Award, the Johns Hopkins University President’s Frontier Award, and has been named one of Vox magazines 50 Future Perfect.

Dr. Dölen is a pioneer and world leader of psychedelics research. She has discovered the synaptic and circuit mechanisms underlying social reward learning (Dölen, et al Nature, 2013; Hung et al Science, 2017; Lewis et al., Neuron, 2020) and shown that this type of learning is constrained by a critical period (Nardou, et al Nature, 2019). Furthermore, psychedelic drugs like MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, and ibogaine are able to reopen the social reward learning critical period, by targeting neural mechanisms governing other critical periods (Nardou, et al, Nature, 2019 and Nardou et al, Nature 2023). Building on these insights,  she  has  formulated  the  hypothesis  psychedelics  may  be  the  long  sought  “master  key”  for unlocking  critical  periods  across  the  brain.  Importantly,  understanding  psychedelics  through  this framework dramatically expands the scope of disorders (including autism, stroke, and allergy) that might benefit from adjunct therapy with psychedelics, an approach she has dubbed the PHATHOM project (Psychedelic Healing: Adjunct Therapy Harnessing Opened Malleability, www.phathomproject.org).

In addition, her laboratory has made significant progress towards developing Octopus chierchiae for use in laboratory research. Closing the lifecycle of this species has enabled breeding and raising octopuses in a laboratory setting for the first time (Grearson, et al., Frontiers in Marine Science 2021). The Dölen lab has also completed whole genome sequencing, assembly, and annotation in this species, enabling modern molecular manipulations and the discovery of novel genetic mechanisms (Albertin, et al., in preparation). Furthermore,  because  octopuses  also  exhibit  conserved  behavioral  responses  to  psychedelic  drugs (Edsinger and Dölen, Current Biology 2019), these resources will enable the Dölen lab to understand why critical periods exist, why they close, and why they can be reopened, by comparing solutions across human, mouse, and octopus nervous systems.

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