“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.” 

“The field of neuroscience has been very male-centric. Most studies were historically done on males, and there wasn’t enough information on the female brain in general. This grant is not only a testament to the excellence of the project proposal, but also to the importance of this topic,” said Kundakovic, who learned she received the grant on Jan. 29. 

Kundakovic studies cellular changes in the brain on a molecular level using a mouse model. Her lab specializes in researching the molecular mechanisms behind hormonal changes during the ovarian cycle and how they can change female brain and behavior. Her research results could lead to the development of sex-specific treatments for mental disorders like anxiety and depression—disorders that are more prevalent in women than in men. 

In recent years, Kundakovic and her team discovered that chromatin, a microscopic cell component, changes its shape during the ovarian cycle, which also changes the way genes are expressed. Over the next five years of grant funding from the NIMH, they will build on their research and try to better understand how chromatin changes in brain cells can impact anxiety-related behavior, especially for female mice, in her project “Epigenetic regulation of brain and behavior by the estrous cycle.” 

“We are trying to understand how chromatin changes within brain cells affect cellular function and contribute to changes in behavior and which specific cells are really critical for changing behavior,” said Kundakovic. “With this new grant, we will be able to identify the specific brain cells that are really responsive to hormonal changes and reveal epigenetic regulators that are possible targets for drug treatment.”

Kundakovic said her research has taken on new meaning during the pandemic, an unprecedented period where more people than usual are struggling with their mental health, especially anxiety and depression. 

“The pandemic may widen the gender gap that we are already seeing in anxiety and depression,” Kundakovic said. “We will have even more women who are affected by these disorders.”

Describing all this nighttime cleanup and repair work, Dr. Daniel Barone makes one thing clear: There’s a lot we still don’t know about slumber and the disorders that impede it.

But he makes other things clear too: Better sleep is attainable for those who seek it. And, in our sleep-deprived society, more people need to do that, he says, citing dangers ranging from disease to traffic accidents to everyday fogginess.

“I have a lot of patients come to me and say, ‘You know what, I’m just not as sharp as I used to be,’” he tells an audience at Webster Library on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during a presentation in July. “‘I’m not as quick as I used to be. I go into a room, I can’t remember why I’m there,’ that kind of stuff.

“There’s other reasons for that, possibly, but one of them is sleep,” says Barone, assistant professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine and associate medical director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Barone, a 2001 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill, serves as an increasingly public expert on sleep, appearing in media outlets and giving talks around New York. He’s finding receptive audiences and many opportunities to speak, given the growing concern about sleep deprivation, labeled a “public health epidemic” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because of its links to depression, anxiety, hypertension, obesity, and cancer.

If sleep is essential, however, it’s also frustratingly hard to attain for many, one reason Barone recently authored Let’s Talk About Sleep: A Guide to Understanding and Improving Your Slumber (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Written with Lawrence A. Armour, it tells the stories of patients who found their way to better slumber through considerable patience, persistence, and trial and error. Despite all the recent scientific and technological advances in the field of sleep, there are no quick fixes or standard solutions. As Barone describes it, the quest for better sleep involves not only science, medicine, and proven practices, but also a certain amount of faith.

Discovering Sleep Science

Barone grew up on Long Island, in Franklin Square, studied biology on a premed track at Fordham, and earned his medical degree from New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. He first learned about sleep medicine when he was in residency at Saint Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in New York City. A visiting lecturer spoke about it, and Barone was fascinated.

He went on to complete a one-year fellowship in sleep medicine at Stony Brook University and earned board certifications in neurology and sleep medicine from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

In a way, sleep medicine is still a “great frontier” because of all its unknowns, he says. Some aspects are well established: When light dims, nerve cells in the eye signal the brain’s pineal gland to release melatonin, which readies the body for sleep. While we slumber, long-term memories are solidified as the brain pares back some nerve connections and strengthens others, Barone says. And because it is a powerful antioxidant, melatonin also cleans up free radicals, metabolic byproducts that could damage cells and pave the way for heart disease or cancer.

Other functions of sleep have only recently come to light. In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center discovered the glymphatic system, a kind of “shadow plumbing system” in the brain, according to a university statement. It fires up only during slumber, flushing out toxins that build up during the day, including those linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Some brain cells actually shrink to accommodate this outflow, Barone says.

But many aspects of slumber are still poorly understood, like the tipping point between our waking and sleeping states, as shown by the fact that “we never remember the exact moment at which sleep onset occurs,” Barone writes in the book.

Sleep disorders offer up plenty of unknowns as well. Barone’s research focus is REM behavior disorder, in which people act out their dreams during the rapid-eye-movement stage of sleep. Other scientists are studying restless legs syndrome, one condition that impedes the slumber of Barone’s patients. “We know so much about the brain, but there’s still a lot we don’t understand about restless legs syndrome,” he says.

A Concern for All Ages

Some sleep disruptors are better understood, like blue light from computer screens, which keeps nerve cells in the eye from triggering the release of melatonin. One of the most common disorders is sleep apnea, in which the tongue repeatedly falls back to block the airway, interrupting sleep and causing daytime drowsiness. It afflicts as many as one-quarter of middle-aged men and 9 percent of women, according to Barone, although its severity varies.

His patients have often been sleep deprived and exhausted for years. They may struggle to fall asleep, wake up too early, or wake up tired after a full night’s slumber. Some only learn about their disorders after spending a night in the Weill Cornell sleep clinic, hooked up to monitoring equipment.

Let’s Talk About Sleep includes a variety of stories from patients (identified only by first names) who volunteered to be interviewed for the book. They tend to be middle-aged or older, as sleep tends to degrade with age because of weight gain, hormonal changes, prostate issues, or other things, he says.

But young people are hardly immune to sleep troubles. As Barone describes in his book, one patient’s sleep disorder—narcolepsy—emerged in high school, causing her to fall asleep in class. And sleep needs to be a big priority for college students, no matter how overstuffed their schedules are, Barone says, noting that sleep loss is linked to anxiety and depression, and can also get in the way of one’s studies.

Barone has some experience with this. After studying all night for tests as an undergraduate at Fordham, he found that he didn’t remember much of anything unless he found time to sleep. In fact, a quick nap was enough. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s pretty amazing—just a little bit of sleep actually helps you to retain the information.’ Without it, it was almost impossible.”

Treating Sleep Loss

Treatments vary from patient to patient. Medication is just one, often short-term, option. Behavior changes, like avoiding electronic screens before bed, are also important. For insomnia, one of Barone’s preferred techniques is mindfulness meditation, which activates the relaxing parasympathetic nervous system, improving not only sleep but also one’s general mindset, he says.

Technology also plays a role. Sleep apnea patients, for instance, may use a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, mask that feeds pressurized air into their airways overnight, allowing them to sleep uninterrupted. Their other options include a dental device that pulls the jaw forward, keeping the tongue away from the back of the throat, or positioning devices to ensure they sleep on their side. One new option is a device implanted in the chest that electrically stimulates the hypoglossal nerve to keep the tongue from collapsing backward.

Whatever the sleep issue, the patient’s attitude is key, Barone says. Another patient mentioned in Let’s Talk About Sleep, a 61-year-old married mother of two, was waking up at midnight or 1 a.m. and tossing and turning for the rest of the night. This problem had persisted for 15 or 20 years. Then she heard an expert speak about the ill effects of sleep loss. The presentation hit home; she realized that she was in fact noticing some of the effects, like rising blood pressure, so she changed her “tough it out” attitude and sought help.

In consultation with Barone, she devised a regimen including progressive muscle relaxation, regular bedtimes, and the use of an alarm clock. Over time, her sleep improved. “It has made an incredible difference in my life,” she says in the book.

One of the most important changes she made was psychological. She developed what she called “an overall appreciation for the importance of sleep.” This appreciation doesn’t always take hold easily in the U.S., where the ability to do without sleep is viewed “almost like a badge of honor,” Barone says. “I’ve been guilty of that myself.”

Slighting the Sandman

Adults generally need seven to nine hours of sleep per night on average, according to the National Sleep Foundation. But, as stated in the book, more than a third of Americans are regularly getting inadequate shuteye. And some 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders and periodic sleep problems, according to the National Institutes of Health.

People can be blind to the impact of sleep loss. Barone noted that one 2003 study by researchers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania found that people limited to six hours of sleep or less for several nights were just as impaired in a simple attention test as those who had missed as much as two whole nights of sleep.

All the same, the participants thought their bodies and minds were adjusting to the sleep loss, and that they were “doing OK” on the attention test. “In reality, they were not doing OK,” Barone says. “They were making a lot of mistakes,” and “this is just a small scale. You can imagine what’s happening when sleep deprivation is much more chronic,” he adds, naming motorists’ impaired reaction times in particular.

Such concerns are one reason why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described sleep deprivation as a public health epidemic, and why Barone has accepted so many invitations to speak publicly. He hopes that it will eventually be recognized that “lack of quality sleep for a long period of time is as bad for us as smoking,” he says.

Dreaming of Better Sleep

One of sleep’s greatest mysteries is dreaming, a particular interest of Barone’s. He and other researchers are in the midst of a privately funded three-year study of REM behavior disorder, caused by a failure of the sleep paralysis that usually keeps people from acting out their dreams. Someone dreaming about being in a fight, for instance, might thrash about in bed, Barone says. While this kind of thing is alarming, the real concern—and the focus of the study—is the link between this disorder and Parkinson’s disease, he says.

The possible benefits of dreams are the biggest question mark of all. “There must be a good reason” for them, given the amount of brainpower they require, Barone writes; the sleeping brain not only generates the content of dreams but also the slumbering mind’s experience of them, a level of activity that indicates that dreaming “is not some random thing,” he writes.

Theories abound: Dreaming may prepare us for the stresses and threats of waking life by providing a kind of dry run during sleep. They may provide a “theater of the mind” in which we work through problems, or allow us to test out emotional reactions to various situations. “There’s probably 10 different theories as to why we dream. Nobody knows for sure,” Barone says. “The brain is beyond complex,” with 100 billion neurons interacting in uncounted trillions of ways.

In Let’s Talk About Sleep, he conveys respect for sleep and the need to give it its due. Rather than serve as a medical text, the book is meant to stimulate interest in sleep, Barone writes; he urges readers to talk to a doctor about their particular sleep troubles and medical concerns. In his July presentation, he offered some tips for getting better sleep generally, like exercising and setting regular bedtimes. And he made it clear that being patient and putting one’s expectations on the shelf were also important. “None of these things are going to change your sleep overnight—pun intended,” he said.

His patients may work for weeks, months, or longer, trying different approaches and laying the groundwork for better sleep, which he describes as something to be encouraged, coaxed, cajoled. Or won over, perhaps.

“I always say, sleep is kind of like love,” Barone says. You can do all the right things and put yourself in a position to make it happen, he says, but ultimately it follows its own timetable. “I always tell patients, ‘Let me worry about your sleep. You just concentrate on doing the right things, and eventually sleep will happen.’”

See Related: Seven Tips for Better Sleep

The $400,000 developmental grant is a supplement to an existing grant that focuses on discrimination and sleep patterns of African-American and Latino adolescents. With the new funding from the National Institutes of Health, Yip hopes to include the experiences of Chinese students.

“There has been a lot of research on discrimination among young African Americans and Latinos, but there isn’t much research on Asian-American teens,” said Yip, who directs the Applied Developmental Psychology Program at Fordham.

According to the limited research that does exist, Asian youth report levels of discrimination that are similar to, if not greater than, those experienced by African-American and Latino teens.

Yip is particularly interested in how discrimination among racial and ethnic teens affects sleeping patterns and health since “sleep is so important for the foundation and development of one’s memory over time.”

24-Hour Monitoring

Once a year, ninth-grade students chosen for the two-year study will wear wristwatches for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for two-week periods. They will complete surveys on their daily interactions, emotions, and school activities every evening.

“Think of the watches as more high-tech, data-capturing Fitbits,” said Yip.

She anticipates stronger physical effects, rather than psychological, for the Asian students, such as headaches, stomachaches, loss of appetite, and other physical expressions of stress. That is because research suggests that rather than verbalizing emotions, Asians/Asian Americans are more likely to express their feelings in somatic ways. Therefore, while their levels of depression and anxiety may seem unaffected by discrimination, “we may see stronger effects on sleep and other physical health outcomes,” she said.

“The idea is that if kids experience discrimination in school, they may think less well when they are doing homework that evening,” said Yip. “Over time, discrimination and disturbed sleeping habits may affect focus, and students start to underperform.”

“The social, cultural, and historical context of Asian-American teens is very different from African-American and Latino teens,” said Yip, adding that there are more variables to consider, such as immigration status and cultural relationships.

Yip said it was a more difficult process to make a case for studying Asian-American teens, acknowledging the stereotype that Asian Americans have higher performance and academic readiness.

 A Rising Ethnic Group

But for Yip, who is Asian American, the study is critical at this time because Asian Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the nation.

She hopes that her findings will encourage further global conversations on how to mitigate the effects of discrimination.

“If we find that someone calling you a name makes you sleep poorly at night, it really speaks to the whole connection between the social experiences we have and what happens in our body and to our health.”

-Angie Chen, FCLC ’11