Erin Calipari

Associate Professor of Pharmacology Vanderbilt University

  • NASHVILLE TN

Expert in the neuroscience of mental illness and addiction, including gender differences.

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Vanderbilt University

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Spotlight

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Addiction expert on FDA plan to lower nicotine levels

Erin Calipari, assistant professor of pharmacology, is available for media commentary on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s plans for a proposed rule to require companies to lower the nicotine levels in cigarettes. Erin is lead researcher at the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research, and her research focuses on the neuroscience behind addiction. She can speak to how the brain gets addicted to substances and the many ways in which addiction takes a toll on the human body, as well as nicotine dosing. Much of Erin's research also focuses on gender differences in addiction and the need to understand female-specific factors that contribute to Substance Use Disorder.

Erin Calipari

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Biography

Calipari received her PhD in Neuroscience in 2013 in the laboratory of Sara Jones at Wake Forest University School of Medicine where she studied how self-administered drugs altered dopaminergic function to drive addictive behaviors. She then went on to complete her postdoctoral training with Eric Nestler at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she used circuit probing techniques to understand the temporally specific neural signals that underlie motivation and reward learning. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Pharmacology. Her independent work seeks to characterize and modulate the precise circuits in the brain that underlie both adaptive and maladaptive processes in reward, motivation, and associative learning.

Areas of Expertise

Opioids
adaptive processes
self-administered drugs
Dopamine
Addiction and Recovery
Brain Behavior
Medicine and Drugs
Addiction
Neuroscience
Brain
Addictive Behavior
associative learning
Pharmacology
neural signals
maladaptive processes

Accomplishments

Daniel X. Freedman Award

2019, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation

DP1 Avenir Award in Genetics and Epigenetics

2019, National Institute on Drug Abuse

NARSAD Young Investigator Award

2018, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation

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Education

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Postdoctoral Training

2017

Advisor, Eric J Nestler, MD, Ph.D.

Wake Forest School of Medicine

Ph.D

Neuroscience

2013

Advisor, Sara R. Jones, Ph.D

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

B.S.

Biology

2009

With honors

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Affiliations

  • Frontiers in Psychiatry (Addictive Disorders) : Associate Editor
  • American College of Neuropsychopharmacology : ACNP Associate Membership
  • Neuropsychopharmacology : Editorial Board

Selected Media Appearances

Online gambling could threaten public health, new report says

The National Desk  tv

2024-10-25

Geoff Harris breaks down a new report on online gambling.

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She Studies How Addiction Hijacks Learning in the Brain

Quanta Magazine  online

2023-12-07

Erin Calipari comes from a basketball family. Her father, John Calipari, has coached college and professional basketball since 1998, leading six teams to the NCAA Final Four, and her brother coaches men’s basketball at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she now works. But when she joined her college team as an undergraduate, she realized her strengths lay elsewhere. “I was fine. I wasn’t great,” she said. “It was pretty clear to me a couple years in that it was not a career path.”

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The $200 billion playbook that kneecapped Big Tobacco is coming for Mark Zuckerberg and his social media offspring

Fortune  online

2023-10-26

The social media lawsuits are far from perfect parallels to the tobacco litigation. First, social media users do not experience physical withdrawal in absence of the platforms, says Erin Calipari, the Associate Director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Addiction Research. This will make it harder for the attorneys general to argue that social media is an addiction akin to drugs or tobacco ones. What’s more, Calipari notes that social media has some benefits, such as helping people foster connections with others and to communicate with people around the world. “The question is, how do you balance that with the potential risk?” she asks.

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Selected Event Appearances

Activity-dependent changes in the dopamine transporter underlie addiction vulnerability in females.

ISN Satellite Brain in Flux Meeting  Montreal, Québec, Canada

2019-08-01

Dopaminergic mechanisms underlying sex differences in valence-based decision making

Gordon Conference on Catecholamines  Newry, ME

2019-08-01

Developing novel preclinical models to study addiction in females

College on Problems of Drug Dependence  San Antonio, TX

2019-06-01

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Selected Articles

The role of the neuropeptide PEN receptor, GPR83, in the reward pathway: Relationship to sex-differences

Neuropharmacology

Amanda K Fakira, Emily G Peck, Yutong Liu, Lindsay M Lueptow, Nikita A Trimbake, Ming-Hu Han, Erin S Calipari, Lakshmi A Devi

2019

GPR83, the receptor for the neuropeptide PEN, exhibits high expression in the nucleus accumbens of the human and rodent brain, suggesting that it plays a role in modulating the mesolimbic reward pathway. However, the cell-type specific expression of GPR83, its functional impact in the reward pathway, and in drug reward-learning has not been fully explored. Using GPR83/eGFP mice, we show high GPR83 expression on cholinergic interneurons in the nucleus accumbens and moderate expression on ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons.

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Cues play a critical role in estrous cycle-dependent enhancement of cocaine reinforcement

Neuropsychopharmacologyvolume

Amy R. Johnson, Kimberly C. Thibeault, Alberto J. Lopez, Emily G. Peck, L. Paul Sands, Christina M. Sanders, Munir Gunes Kutlu & Erin S. Calipari

2019

While preclinical work has aimed to outline the neural mechanisms of drug addiction, it has overwhelmingly focused on male subjects. There has been a push in recent years to incorporate females into existing addiction models; however, males and females often have different behavioral strategies, making it important to not only include females, but to develop models that assess the factors that comprise female drug addiction.

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Sex Differences in Value-Based Decision Making Underlie Substance Use Disorders in Females

Alcohol and Alcoholism

Jennifer E Zachry, Amy R Johnson, Erin S Calipari

2019

For many psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and addiction, sex is a critical biological variable and women represent a particularly vulnerable population (Piccinelli and Wilkinson, 2000; Becker et al., 2017). While sex differences in the pervasiveness and prognosis of these disorders have long been known to exist, there are few instances where approaches to pharmacological treatment of these disorders differ between the sexes, which likely contributes to ineffective treatments in women.

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