Affiliation: University of Colorado- Anschutz Medical Campus, Department of Pediatrics, Section of Developmental Biology

Dr. Austin Adkins received his B.S. in Marine Biology from Old Dominion University in 2017. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Center of Integrative Neuroscience and Inflammatory Diseases, Department of Pathology and Anatomy, at Eastern Virginia Medical School in 2020 and 2023, respectively. There, he worked in the Sleep Laboratory under Drs. Larry D. Sanford and Laurie L. Wellman and described the mechanisms by which the sleep and neuroimmune systems are linked and integrated during the stress response.

Specifically, using optogenetics in rodents, he characterized the regulatory role of the basolateral amygdala by showing amygdalar outputs influenced regional communication, local immune responses, and metabolic profiles of other regions within the greater stress-responsive circuit. Furthermore, he showed how these alterations may modulate other systems, such as learning and memory, and behavioral outputs, and their relevance for psychiatric diseases/disorders.

He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Charles Sagerström studying the role of unique transcription factors that are critical for hindbrain development but also play key roles in sleep, immunity, and learning and memory in adulthood. He hopes to define the link between mutations in these transcription factors linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, and how they may be associated with these individuals’ predisposition for sleep, immune, memory, and behavioral comorbidities later in life.