Acta Psychopathologica Open Access

Dr. Zuxin Chen

Biography

The basic principle of our brain function is information processing. In my PhD, I studied synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity which are fundamental for brain functions. I found that presynaptic protein Munc13 family are critical for synaptic transmission in a central synapse. I also found that the distance between synaptic vesicles and calcium channels have a higher impact of the speed of synaptic transmission, with the shorter the distance the faster of the synaptic transmission. I joined the department of pharmacology at Mount Sinai after my PhD. Here I am working on addiction and other psychiatry disorders like depression, anxiety and schizophrenic.

Research Interest

I have great interest in study mental disorders include addiction and depression. I want to understand the cellular and neural circuit mechanisms that underling these mental illness. Targeting the malfunction neural circuits will bring new novel therapeutics to treat these diseases in the future. My current projects focused on how nicotine affects our brain function. I want to investigate whether and how nicotine shapes the neural circuits that express dense of nicotinic receptors in the brain.