Zoe Donaldson

Zoe R. Donaldson is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Donaldson explores the neurobiological and genetic mechanisms of social bonding and social behavior in rodents. Her work will help to elucidate how variations in genetics and circuit activity across the population predispose certain individuals to mental illness. Donaldson is a pioneer in the use of the monogamous prairie voles to study social behaviors and has been developing novel genetic tools, since her graduate work at Emory University, to study voles in the lab to better understand the neural circuits underlying pair bonding.

Early life and education Donaldson was raised in Reno, Nevada. At the age of 16, Donaldson left high school to pursue college level classes at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. During her time at UCLA, Donaldson travelled to West Africa to study Malaria, and later conducted research under the mentorship of Barney Schlinger. She presented her work at several conferences.

In 2002, Donaldson completed her Bachelors of Science at the age of 21 and decided to pursue her graduate studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Donaldson studied under the mentorship of Larry J. Young in the Department of Psychiatry at Emory. She used the monogamous Prairie Vole as a model organism to study the neural correlates of social behavior and the roles of oxytocin and vasopressin in driving social behaviors in these organisms. She first explored variation at the AVPR1A locus in primates and found both single and duplicated alleles of this gene. Following these findings, Donaldson created three mouse lines with which to study variation in the upstream regions of the AVPR1A gene.

Donaldson completed her PhD in Neuroscience in 2009, and moved to New York City to pursue her postdoctoral training at Columbia University under the mentorship of René Hen. In Hen's lab, Donaldson probed the role of the Serotonin 1A autoreceptor in behavior. She first examined how suppression of 5-HT1A signalling in the raphe neurons early in life impacted anxiety and social behaviors. Donaldson found that the rs6295G allele of 5-HT1AR is associated with increased risk for substance abuse, psychiatric hospitalization, and suicide attempts. Specifically, Donaldson focuses on how social relationships modulate mood and behavior. She tries to understand how losing a partner, social loss, causes pain and grief at the neural circuit level. Donaldson explored the potential in activating neurons involved in social processing to attenuate fear, mimicking the experience of social buffering. Using in vivo calcium imaging, Donaldson imaged the activity of neurons in the nucleus accumbens during pair bond formation and found that neurons specifically responded to partner approach and that the ensemble of neurons encoding partner approach increased in size over time and predicted the strength of the pair-bond. 2018 NIH New Innovator Award Recipient 2018 National Science Foundation Edge Award 2018 Dana Foundation Award - Grant Mahoney Neuroimaging Program 2017 Whitehall Foundation Award 2009 Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar 2003 HHMI Predoctoral Fellowship