Dragana Rogulja

Dragana Rogulja is a Serbian neuroscientist and circadian biologist who is an assistant professor in Neurobiology within the Harvard Medical School Blavatnik Institute of Neurobiology. Rogulja explores the molecular mechanisms governing sleep in Drosophila as well as probing how circadian mechanisms integrate sensory information to drive behavior. Rogulja uses mating behavior in Drosophila to explore the neural circuits linking internal states to motivated behaviors.

Early life and education Rogulja was born in Belgrade, Serbia. She pursued an undergraduate education in pharmacy at the University of Belgrade, but was driven to study abroad due to the economic situation in Belgrade.

Rogulja stayed at Rutgers University to pursue her graduate training in 2000. She joined the lab of Kenneth D. Irvine to study intercellular signalling and regulation of tissue growth by morphogen gradients in drosophila. In her first author paper published in Cell in 2005, Rogulja showed, for the first time, that the regulation of wing growth in Drosophila is governed by the morphogenic gradient of Decapentaplegic (DPP). Rogulja found that cyclin A (CycA) and its regulator cyclin A1 promote sleep in Drosophila. They found that TARA interacts with CycA to promote sleep and that it acts through inhibiting Cdk1 in the arousal center of the fly brain. As the principal investigator of the Ragoluja Lab, Rogulja runs a research program with three main focuses: sleep, circadian biology, and motivation. Rogulja uses both Drosophila and rodent models to answer her questions on these topics.

One facet of Rogulja's lab explores the neural mechanisms governing mating behavior in drosophila. In 2016, Rogulja and her colleagues discovered the role of dopamine in reflecting the mating need state in males flies and driving the appropriate reproductive behaviors. They found that a motivational dopamine signal drives the initiation of courtship behavior through interactions with P1 neurons, and the same dopamine signal arriving at P1 following initiation of copulation helps to sustain copulation as well as terminate it. They identified an excitation loop in Drosophila wherein increased dopaminergic tone increased the propensity to court but then after copulation, CREB2 generates an inhibitory environment by increasing expression of leaky potassium channels, which helps to stabilize peak motivation in reproductive drive and induce reproductive satiety. They further used computational tools to reproducibly model the observed behavioral and physiological dynamics in mating behavior. 2016 Pew Biomedical Scholar 2015 NYSCF – Robertson Neuroscience Investigator

Select publications Zhang SX, Rogulja D, Crickmore MA. Recurrent Circuitry Sustains Drosophila Courtship Drive While Priming Itself for Satiety. 2019. Current Biology : Cb. PMID 31474539 Rogulja D, Irvine KD. Regulation of cell proliferation by a morphogen gradient. 2005. Cell. 123: 449–61. PMID 16269336 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2005.08.030 Kuznedelov K, Minakhin L, Niedziela-Majka A, Dove SL, Rogulja D, Nickels BE, Hochschild A, Heyduk T, Severinov K. A role for interaction of the RNA polymerase flap domain with the sigma subunit in promoter recognition. Science. 295: 855–7.