Marta Sabariego

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  • Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Behavior
Marta Sabariego

Marta Sabariego is interested in the neural circuits of emotion and memory at the systems level. In particular, Sabariego investigates the mechanisms that support recovery and adaptation from situations involving surprising reward loss and how these life events affect cognitive processes, in particular memory. These questions are addressed by recording many neurons in the brain simultaneously and by testing how their activity is coordinated before, during, and after reward devaluation. The recording methods are complemented by behavioral, histological analysis of brain tissue and stereotaxic neurosurgery techniques that allow us to manipulate the activity of neuronal networks and to test whether the identified mechanisms are involved in emotional and cognitive processes. Revealing the function of neural circuits for reward loss and memory, including the function of partially damaged circuits, is a critical step for developing treatments to prevent or ameliorate emotional and cognitive problems in disease. The Sabariego lab is therefore also interested in the translational implications of this basic research and in understanding whether anxiety and memory disorders can result from a failure to appropriately organize neuronal activity and synaptic plasticity during our lives.

Sabariego received her Ph.D. in Psychology by the University of Jaén, Spain. During graduate school she was selected to visit the laboratory of Dr. Acquas in Italy to conduct her research for six months in 2012. She also received the CNLM foreign graduate student and Renee Harwick visiting scholar award by the University of California, Irvine in 2013. During her postdoc at the University of California, San Diego, she obtained the Neuroplasticity of Aging Training Grant by the National Institute of Health to investigate cognitive processes linked to disease using single-unit electrophysiological recordings in the laboratory of Stefan Leutgeb. Her coursework has benefited from these international experiences and it covered a wide range of topics of field of neuroscience. Finally, Sabariego is devoted to promoting diversity; she is a member of the BRAINS program designed to accelerate and improve the career advancement of neuroscience postdoctoral scholars and assistant professors from underrepresented groups.

Areas of Expertise

The neural circuits of emotion and memory

Education

  • Ph.D., Lic., University of Jaén
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California, San Diego

Happening at Mount Holyoke

Recent Campus News

³ÉÈËÊÓƵprofessor Marta Sabariego and a group of neuroscience majors led a bilingual workshop for first graders at Edward Nelson White School in Holyoke to understand the intricacies of the brain and inspire them to pursue careers in science.

Mental malaise and brain burn: ³ÉÈËÊÓƵprofessor Marta Sabariego talked to the New York Times about how to manage your mind and train your brain.

³ÉÈËÊÓƵprofessor Marta Sabariego brings vision and goals, with a healthy dose of empathy, to her research and mentorship.

Recent Publications

Anderson, L. G., Vogiatzoglou, E., Tang, S., Luiz, S., Duque, T., Ghaly, J. P., ... & Sabariego, M. (2024). Memory deficits and hippocampal cytokine expression in a rat model of ADHD. Brain, Behavior, & Immunity-Health, 35, 100700.

Honeycutt JA, Young JW, Porcu A, Sabariego M (2022). Editorial: Negative Valence Systems. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.

Vo, A., Tabrizi, N.S., Hunt, T., Cayanan, K., Chitale, S. [MHC’22], Anderson, L. [MHC’23], Tenney, S. [MHC’21], White, A.O., Sabariego, M., Hales, J.B., (2021). . Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 185, 107507.

Tenney, S. [MHC'21], Vogiatzoglou, E. [MHC'23], Chohan, D. [MHC'21], Vo, A., Hunt, T., Cayanan, K., Hales, J. B. and Sabariego, M. (2021). A Time Duration Discrimination Task for the Study of Elapsed Time Processing in Rats. Bio-protocol ,11(6), e3965. DOI: .

Sabariego, M., Tabrizi, N. S., Marshall, G. J., McLagan, A. N., Jawad, S. [MHC'21], & Hales, J. B. (2021). In the temporal organization of episodic memory, the hippocampus supports the experience of elapsed time. Hippocampus31(1), 46-55. [Featured on the journal cover]

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