Nadine Gogolla

Nadine Gogolla is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, leading the Department of Emotion Research. Previously (2014-2021) she has been Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, now Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. She is also an Associate Faculty of the Graduate School for Systemic Neuroscience. Gogolla investigates the neural circuits underlying emotion to understand how the brain integrates external cues, feeling states, and emotions to make calculated behavioral decisions. Gogolla is known for her discovery using machine learning and two-photon microscopy to classify mouse facial expressions into emotion-like categories and correlate these facial expressions with neural activity in the insular cortex.

Early life and education Gogolla conducted her undergraduate studies in human biology at Marburg University in Germany. Right after finishing her undergraduate degree in 2002, Gogolla completed her M.S. at Inserm U546 in Paris, France under the mentorship of Roland Liblau studying neuroimmune interactions in disease models. Shortly after, Gogolla published another Nature Protocols paper outlining a novel method for long-term imaging of neural circuits in organotypic hippocampal slice cultures. Gogolla's third first author Nature Protocols paper was published in 2006 as well outlining a staining protocol for organotypic hippocampal slice cultures. Using these methods, Gogolla was able to graduate summa cum laude the following year in 2007. Gogolla's dissertation was titled "Experience-dependent structural rearrangements of synaptic connectivity in the adult central nervous system".

After completing her PhD in 2007, Gogolla began her postdoctoral training at Harvard University under the mentorship of Takao Hensch. While at Harvard, Gogolla explored the neurobiological mechanisms underlying critical periods of brain development. During this time, Gogolla published two papers that she had been working on during graduate school. The first paper, published in Neuron in 2009, showed that the effects of environmental enrichment on synapse number and hippocampal network structure are mediated by wnt signalling in the CA3 region of the hippocampus. The then published a first author paper in Science, along with her graduate team from Friedrich Miescher Institute, showing that a part of the extracellular matrix, a biological material known as chondroitin sulfate proteglycans, builds up in the amygdala forming perineuronal nets which protect fear memories from erasure. Intriguingly, degrading these perineuronal nets in adulthood using an enzyme that degrades chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans, rendered fear memories susceptible to extinction again. In 2009, Gogolla published a first author paper in the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Her study explored the idea that the complexity of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is a result of aberrant excitatory/inhibitory neural circuit regulation during critical periods in development. Integration of sensory, emotional, and cognitive information allows for these diverse functions of the IC, so Gogolla sought to understand how this integration occurs and how it is aberrantly functioning in ASD models, both idiopathic and monogenic. Through in vivo fluorescence imaging techniques, Gogolla was able to record from the IC and observe multisensory integration emerging in the IC throughout early development, but this process did not occur in ASD models. Their finding suggests that enhancing inhibitory transmission during a critical developmental period can restore inhibitory/excitatory balance and restore normal multisensory integration functions of the IC.

Career and Research After finishing her postdoctoral work at Harvard, Gogolla moved back to Germany in 2014 where she started a faculty position at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany. Gogolla currently leads a group of scientists at MPI where her research program focuses on exploring the neural circuits of the insular cortex as well as their connections to the prefrontal cortex and other limbic structures as a means to understand how it plays a part in so many diverse brain processes. A better understanding of the neural circuit mechanisms mediating diverse functions of the insular cortex, such as emotional regulation, empathy, and social behavior, will give insight into how processes are altered in disease states such as schizophrenia, ASD, addiction, and mood disorders. Using optogenetics, they found that stimulating the pIC caused aversive behaviors as well as increased autonomic responses. Gogolla was inspired by a 2014 Cell paper stating that emotions represent brain states and should last for a discrete amount of time after the stimulus that evoked them and, importantly, they should scale to the strength of the stimulus that evoked them. As such, Gogolla presented salient stimuli to headfixed mice, such as sweet and bitter tastes or slightly painful shocks, meant to trigger specific emotional responses. Not only was the algorithm able to detect distinct facial expressions that correlated to the distinct emotion-evoking stimuli, but the facial expressions were also graded based on the intensity of the stimulus presented. These findings have dramatically improved our ability to dissect how and where emotions arise in the brain, now that we can detect and quantify them in animal models, which opens up the potential to translate these findings to the human brain to understand brain disorders characterized by aberrations in emotional processing and emotional regulation such as mood disorders. 2008 – 2011: Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research – Long-Term Fellowship (declined in favor of HFSP Award)