A neuroscientist investigates the drivers of depression

Devin Rocks has always been drawn to the deep mysteries of the brain. When several friends at his high school in Queens, New York, experienced anxiety and depression, his interest in how the brain works—and why things sometimes go awry—only intensified.

“It’s the organ we know the least about, by far,” he says. In his junior year at Fordham, he started conducting research with biology professor Marija Kundakovic, Ph.D., who studies the female brain.

“Many neuroscience studies, even now, are conducted primarily on male animals,” says Rocks, who completed a bachelor’s degree in integrative neuroscience in 2017 and earned a doctorate in biology from Fordham last spring. But women are about twice as susceptible to depression and anxiety than men, and hormonal fluctuations could be part of the reason why, Rocks says.

His doctoral research built on the Kundakovic Lab’s previous finding that when estrogen levels drop in mice, anxiety and depression-related behaviors increase. Rocks, who is now a postdoctoral associate at Weill Cornell Medicine, identified a molecule that seems to be key for mediating changes in gene expression that are linked to the rodents’ behavioral symptoms—a finding that could help pave the way for sex-specific treatments for anxiety and depression, according to Kundakovic, who says that Rocks’ research will be of “great relevance for women’s mental health.”

“I am inherently curious about how our body operates, especially the brain,” said Gallo, whose lab was awarded the five-year NIH grant this summer. “But I’m also very interested in science because of its power to create knowledge that could help people.”

Gallo is a Honduran-American neuroscientist. At age 18, he earned a scholarship to study in the United States. He became the first in his family to leave Honduras to pursue a college education in the U.S. (Gallo is not the first family member to work in STEM, however—his father is a civil engineer.) He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of New Orleans and his Ph.D. in neuroscience and neurophysiology from Weill Medical College of Cornell University. For the next seven years, he worked in Columbia University’s psychiatry department, where he started as a postdoctoral fellow and then progressed to postdoctoral research scientist, associate research scientist, and assistant professor of clinical neurobiology. 

How Does Our Brain Control Our Motivations? 

In 2018, he became a faculty member at Fordham. He currently teaches cell biology to undergraduates at Fordham College at Rose Hill and students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In addition, he runs his own research lab on the second floor of Larkin Hall, which is devoted to understanding how our brain controls our motivated behavior. 

“What, in our brains, drives our desire to pursue rewarding things? What cells are important for making us willing to work hard at something? For weighing the costs and benefits of a potential decision?” Gallo said. “The goal of our lab is to pinpoint what cells in our brains are critical for some of these behaviors.” 

Scientists have already identified many brain regions that are involved in these behaviors, said Gallo. But they haven’t identified the individual cell types that are related to motivation, especially in the context of impulsivity.  

“Let’s compare this to a car engine. We know the engine is important for the car to run, but how do the individual components in that engine make it function? Our job in the lab is to try to understand the components of that engine—or those key brain cells—and how they work together,” he said. “Once we have enough knowledge about those specific cells, then one day, someone can design therapies that go right to the problem.” 

Understanding Our Impulsive Behavior in the Lab

In his new project funded by the NIH grant, Gallo is studying a small population of brain cells that is often overlooked: cholinergic interneurons. They make up about 2% of all brain cells in a key reward brain region. However, they have a wide range of control of neighboring cells, he said. 

Gallo’s project will tackle several key questions: Are these cells important for a specific motivated behavior—impulsive decision-making, a common trait of people with substance use disorders and other mental illnesses? If so, what is their genetic makeup? And how do these cells function while impulsive behavior is taking place? 

His team will investigate these questions using mice, which are able to make decisions about rewards and be impulsive, just like humans.

“We’re interested in how certain drugs can affect our brain processes to make us more impulsive. They can also cause impulsive behavior and a lack of decision-making abilities. Excessive impulsivity can seriously affect our health, from risky sexual behavior to how much we eat, or whether we take our medications. So if we can fully understand how the brain and all its cells work, in relation to impulsive behavior, then we might be able to target many different problems at once,” he said.   

Brain Research Relevant to the Bronx and Beyond

Gallo said that his research can seem inaccessible—a part of the “ivory tower” of academia. Even the title of his research project, “Cholinergic Interneuron D2 Receptor Function in Impulsive Behavior: Implications for Addiction,” sounds complicated. But his research has the potential to affect millions of people, he said. 

“The subjects that we study—mental illness, substance abuse disorder—are very relevant to our local community here in the Bronx and in New York,” said Gallo, who lives in Washington Heights with his wife and their two daughters. “Illicit drugs are inflicting harm on our health system right now. In the past, these disorders have been treated as a scourge on society. We have blamed people for not wanting to get better, but it’s really not their fault. Our brains are wired in a specific way, and drugs can make it difficult for us to resist addiction. We need to create better treatments and strategies that help people with these disorders.”

He credited his Fordham research team, which is largely made up of undergraduate and graduate students from the biological sciences and integrative neuroscience programs, with helping him reach that goal. In return, they helped him realize something about himself. 

“Mentoring younger generations is one of my favorite things about being here at Fordham. Some of my students may not know for sure that they want to pursue a career in science, but I enjoy inspiring them,” Gallo said. “Sometimes they don’t realize that they want to be a scientist—or that they even can. I hope to inspire them to pursue meaningful careers in solving the mysteries of the brain.” 

But one Fordham student has beaten the odds.

Callan O’Shea, a graduating Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior, studied in Paris for six months last spring. For O’Shea, an integrative neuroscience student on the pre-med track, the trip was not only a “transformational experience to get a bigger scope of the world,” but also a unique step in his path toward becoming a neurosurgeon.

The Value of Human Relationships

Before O’Shea became a college student, he knew he wanted to become a doctor. Outside of his schoolwork during his first two years at Fordham, he volunteered at Mount Sinai West Hospital (formerly known as Roosevelt Hospital), located just a block away from the Lincoln Center campus. In the rehabilitation unit, he worked with elderly patients who had physical injuries, people recovering from stroke and spinal cord injuries, and patients with Parkinson’s disease. In the emergency room, he recorded patient needs and relayed their requests to medical staff.

It was there, he said, that he learned about the importance of connecting with patients—not just as clients, but as people.

“Speaking with patients in these often vulnerable conditions … they place a lot of trust in you, and it really touched me,” O’Shea said. “Then moving to emergency medicine, seeing the pace of that, and having the ability to do so much good so quickly—having that responsibility reinforced that.”

Nurturing a Passion for Neuroscience Abroad

Through online research, O’Shea began to look for research topics that connected his hospital volunteer service with his surgical interests. That’s when he learned about neural engraftment in Parkinson’s patients: taking skin cells from patients, turning them into new neurons, and implanting them into the same patients to rehabilitate motor skills.

“Being able to grow healthy neurons and insert them surgically into patients to restore function is something that really sparked my interest,” O’Shea said.

At the beginning of 2018, he studied abroad in Paris, where he conducted hands-on neuroscience research. At the Université Paris Descartes Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurosciences, he examined social memory in the brains of mice. He also traveled a few days a week to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, where he analyzed how information is recorded and communicated within a hospital unit.

In those six months, O’Shea also got to take in Parisian culture. He lived with a host family, improved his fluency in French, and took a tap and jazz dance class at the Paris Marais Dance School.

It was his first time traveling abroad, thanks to the Center for University Programs Abroad—an independent organization introduced to him by Fordham’s study abroad office. This month, O’Shea returned to France for the annual Cannes Film Festival.

“[Studying abroad] was really important for me, as someone who didn’t really travel at all growing up and as a science student who doesn’t usually have the opportunity to incorporate language classes and things like that,” O’Shea said.  

When he returned from France, he wanted to extend that same potential to his classmates in the integrative neuroscience department, many of whom haven’t yet studied abroad.

“He set up a meeting with me and the chair of his department so the three of us could talk through how we could make [studying abroad]easier for his classmates,” said Joseph Rienti, Ph.D., the director of international and study abroad programs at Fordham. “One of the most remarkable things about Callan is that he does things not just for himself—there’s a real altruistic and broader vision that he has.”

Combining Neuroscience and Medicine

When he returned to New York, he began working as a research volunteer at the Icahn Medical Institute at Mount Sinai. O’Shea’s experiments spanned different strains of science: genetics, genomics, and neuroscience. In one research study, he and his colleagues took skin cells from schizophrenia patients and converted them into stem cells, then analyzed their potential.

“We essentially had cultures of patient neurons in a dish that we could test for certain drugs and analyze for genetic effects,” O’Shea explained.

After he graduates from Fordham this May, he will return to the Icahn Medical Institute at Mount Sinai; this time, though, he’ll be working as a full-time research technician. Once he gains enough out-of-classroom experience, he plans on applying to dual M.D./Ph.D. programs in neuroscience and neurosurgery next year.

But for O’Shea, the most rewarding part of being in the medical field is more than translating research into real-life applications. It’s the relationships—the intimacy of patient-doctor interactions and the special camaraderie shared among doctors, nurses, and technicians in difficult situations.

“The relationships that the medical field builds are really, really special,” O’Shea said.