Epigenomic programming of brain plasticity and disease risk by ovarian hormones
Speaker
Dre Marija Kundakovic, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
Fordham University
Speaker Biography
Dr. Marija Kundakovic is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Fordham University. She graduated from the School of Pharmacy and completed a Master’s degree in Experimental Pharmacology at the School of Medicine of the University of Belgrade. She then received a PhD in Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and completed her postdoctoral training at Columbia University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. In 2015, she was awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator Award by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation and established her research laboratory at Fordham University. Dr. Kundakovic has been at the forefront of psychiatric epigenetics research since her early career, and her lab focuses on hormonal and environmental factors driving sex differences in depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. The Kundakovic lab discovered sex-specific epigenetic regulation in the female brain as a function of the ovarian cycle, providing a new molecular framework to study the female-specific susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. Dr. Kundakovic’s research is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. She is an elected Council Member of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and an elected Associate Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.