Quarterly
Newsletter

JULY 2025

Welcome to the July 2025 issue of the Women in Learning (WIL) Quarterly Newsletter! As we celebrate our 15th anniversary, we're excited to share updates on our community's achievements, upcoming events, and new initiatives. In this issue, we’re also pleased to introduce our new leadership team and highlight recent publications from WIL members.

Upcoming Highlights: Sydney Reception, Mentorship Launch & DEI Webinar

This summer, WIL will co-host the Welcome Reception at the Pavlovian Society Annual Meeting in Sydney, Australia, on August 7, 2025. Our distinguished guest speaker, Dr. Natalie Tronson from the University of Michigan, will discuss her research on memory mechanisms and her experiences in academia.

We are thrilled to announce our new initiative to foster mentoring relationships within our community. We encourage folks from all career stages to fill out this form and help us launch WIL’s new mentorship program.

This fall, we’ll be hosting a webinar: Navigating the DEI Executive Orders: Actionable Steps to Prioritize Inclusion in Science. Stay tuned for details!

Women in Learning at the Pavlovian Society Meeting – Sydney, August 7-10:

📅Thursday, August 7

●       6:00 PM – Welcome Reception and Women in Learning Event. Location: House of Merivale (Slip Inn)

📅 Friday, August 8

●       1:30 PM – Session Chair: Dr. Abha Rajbhandari

○       Session Title: The Associative Basis of Cognition

●       2:35 PM – Dr. Sydney Trask

○       Talk Title: Stimulus specificity of unconditional stimulus deflation

●       2:55 PM – Dr. Laura Corbit

○       Talk Title: The role of noradrenaline in negative error prediction and related learning

●       3:35 PM – Dr. Natalie Tronson

○       Women in Learning Lecture: Individual differences in Pavlovian conditioning: Insights into neuroimmune control of attentional function 

📅Saturday, August 9

●       10:35 AM – Session Chair: Dr. Nicole Ferrara

○       Session Title: Stress and Aggression

●       10:40 AM – Dr. Moriel Zelikowsky

○       Talk Title: Opposing signaling systems control the escalation and release of aggression

●       4:10 PM – Dr. Kate Wassum

○       Talk Title: Stress, Agency, and Habit

●       5:10 PM – Dr. Jennifer Perusini

○       Talk Title: Taking SEFL out of the lab: Development of amygdala-specific AMPA receptor inhibitors for the treatment of PTSD

●       5:50 PM – Dr. Janine Kwapis

○       Talk Title: Age-related impairments in memory updating stem from reduced co-allocation

Outstanding Graduate Women in Learning Award

The Outstanding Graduate WIL Award will be awarded to one member to honor their significant research accomplishments in the field of learning theory, neuroscience, or psychology. The deadline is July 31st no later than 11:59AM ET! To apply for this award one must have completed one year of graduate studies, be attending Pavlovian 2025, & made significant contributions to the field of learning theory, neuroscience, or psychology. Either graduate students themselves or their research advisor can submit an entry. Please send the information below to womeninlearning@gmail.com:

• Current CV

• Letter of recommendation from your graduate research advisor

The awardee will be announced during the WIL reception Thursday, August 7th, in Sydney. The awardee will be granted a pre-paid registration for the 2026 Pavlovian Society annual meeting! Click here for more details.

Recent publications and patents by team WIL:

• Dr. Moriel Zelikowsky has a new review discussing perspectives on neuropeptide function and social isolation, and a new preprint that examines how the co-release of opposing signaling molecules from cortical neurons controls the escalation and release of aggression.

• Dr. Janine Kwapis has a new review which discusses memory modification, updating, and distortion in humans and rodents, and a new preprint that examines how age and sex influence diurnal memory oscillations, circadian rhythmicity, and Per1 expression.

• Dr. Sydney Trask has a new paper that examines how stress-enhanced fear learning can be reduced through unconditional stimulus deflation with constraints, and another new paper that examines how the interval between conditional stimulus onset and unconditional stimulus onset, not training-to-test interval, shapes immediate early gene expression in the anterior retrosplenial cortex.

• Dr. Nicole Ferrara has a new paper demonstrating how repeated social stress increases posterior medial amygdala neuronal activity in stress-susceptible adult male rats.

• A new paper with Margarita Kapustina reveals how atypical hippocampal excitatory neurons express and govern object memory, as well as another new paper that examines how CSF1R ligands promote microglial proliferation but are not the sole regulators of developmental microglial proliferation.

• A new perspective article with Dr. Heidi Meyer discusses how early reward processing can be reframed within the context of developmental transitions. She also has a new paper that examines how environmental enrichment has age- and sex-specific effects on fear regulation in mice, and another paper that characterizes how age and sex independently influence safety learning in mice.

• Dr. Abha Rajbhandari has a new article that discusses how neurons participating in forming memories of a cold environment communicate with the part of the brain that regulates metabolic responses to cold stress.

• Dr. Jennifer Perusini has been awarded a new patent detailing the compositions and methods of a biomarker-based PTSD diagnostic.

Are you a WIL member and would like to be featured in the next issue? Email your publication’s DOI and full name to womeninlearning@gmail.com with “Member Publication Highlight” in the subject. Preprints are welcome!

Say hello!

Let’s welcome our new WIL member:

WIL would like to highlight a new member that has recently joined, Dr. Laura Corbit, at the University of Toronto! Dr. Corbit shared the following about her research: “Our lab studies the behavioural and neural control of instrumental learning and reward-seeking behaviours. We are particularly interested in goal-directed learning and habit learning, how each is acquired, as well as how different training conditions or life experiences such as diet or exposure to drugs alter the balance between these learning processes. We also study extinction and our work there aims to find ways to produce more lasting behaviour change that is stable across time and contexts.” Laura will be presenting at the upcoming Pavlovian Society Meeting and would be happy to meet WIL members.

WIL is thrilled to have three new leadership members! Learn more about their research below:

Margarita Kapustina is a PhD student at UBC’s Cembrowski lab. She is currently a member of WIL’s executive leadership and a Director of Mentoring. Her research identifies and maps transcriptomic subtypes of the brain's deepest cortical neurons (termed “Layer 6b”) and aims to reveal a cell-type-specific switch for alertness in the mouse brain through functionally manipulating a unique L6b subtype.

Hannah Boyd is a PhD student in the Kwapis Lab at Penn State. She is currently a member of WIL’s executive leadership committee and a Co-Director of Committees. Her research seeks to identify sex-specific molecular mechanisms involved in fear sensitization. In addition, she is currently investigating genes which are sensitive to estrogenic signaling during memory consolidation.

Denisse Paredes is a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Kate Wassum’s lab at UCLA. She is currently a member of WIL’s executive leadership in an outreach capacity. Her research focuses on developing interventions that reverse stress-induced behavioral deficits. She is particularly interested in studying how interventions alter amygdala-striatal circuitry that underlies action-outcome learning.

We have new Merch!

If you are interested in purchasing limited edition “WIL World Tour” t-shirts find the order form here. (T-shirt cost: $33 & shipping if applicable is $7)