Research

Sickness is characterized by behavioral and physiologic changes such as fever, anorexia, and social withdrawal. We are interested in the mechanistic basis of these changes – how they arise from communication between the immune system and the brain. Importantly, we conduct a majority of our studies in the context of live pathogen models, enabling us to understand how the complex interplay between host and pathogen influences the generation of sickness across the time course of an infectious challenge.

The foundation of this work is our discovery that different pathogens elicit distinct sickness states (unpub), characterized by unique repertoires of behavior, neural activity, and gene expression programs across pathogens. A major goal of our work is to elaborate the mechanisms by which brain-immune system interactions lead to the generation of these pathogen-specific states.

Is sickness adaptive, or is it an inevitable, unintended consequence of infection? A second, major goal of our work is to leverage the tools of molecular neuroscience in conjunction with classical host-pathogen experimental paradigms to assess how sickness influences host and microbial fitness.

By studying neuroimmune control of sickness in live pathogen models, we can directly assess the contribution of sickness to pathogen control and host survival. Our ultimate goal is to understand sickness as a host defense strategy.