Catherine S. Woolley, PhD

Administrative Accomplishments 

I have held several administrative positions that provided experience managing budgets (cost study, forecasting, reconciliation, reporting) and working collaboratively with staff. At Northwestern, I founded a research core facility and served as its Director for 13 years; I served as Director of an NIH T32 training program; I founded the undergraduate program in Neuroscience and served as its Director for six years; and I served for three years as Associate Dean for Research in Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. For SfN, I served as a Councilor for four years (2014-18) and currently sit on the Finance Committee. Altogether, this background should serve me well in fulfilling the responsibilities of SfN Treasurer.

Current Position(s) at Your Current Institution

• William Deering Professor of Biological Sciences
  Department of Neurobiology (primary)
  Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
  Department of Neurology (secondary)
  Feinberg School of Medicine
  Northwestern University

Degree, Institute, Year Earned

Research Areas

• Neuromodulation
• Sex differences in the brain
• Seizures and epilepsy
• Neurobiology of stress
• Social drivers of health

Memberships & Service

Service Positions

Editorial Boards:

Other Service Positions:

Science Biography

I was introduced to neuroscience when I had the good fortune to work with Bruce McEwen as a PhD student at Rockefeller University from 1987-93. I completed postdoctoral training with Philip Schwartzkroin in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Washington and then moved to Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in 1998. At Northwestern, my research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NINDS, NIDA, NIMH), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Northwestern University Women’s Health Research Institute.

Research in my lab focuses on steroid regulation of synaptic structure and function and on sex differences in mechanisms of synaptic modulation. Most of my work has been on estrogen actions in the hippocampus. As a PhD student, I found that the density and number of dendritic spines and excitatory synapses in the hippocampus of rats fluctuate across the estrous cycle in a hormone-dependent manner. During my postdoc, I showed that estrogen-driven structural plasticity in the hippocampus is associated with specific changes in hippocampal physiology and synaptic plasticity. At Northwestern, I continued to study mechanisms by which estrogens modulate synaptic function and the consequences of that modulation for neurophysiology and behavior. Using a range of experimental approaches including molecular biology, biochemistry, light and electron microscopy, in vitro and in vivo electrophysiology, and behavioral analysis, my lab has investigated how estrogens influence brain function in the context of seizures related to epilepsy as well as in affective disorders such as anxiety and depression. Two main ideas driving our work have been: 1) that estrogens are produced not only in periphery as hormones but also directly within the brain (of both sexes) as neurosteroids that influence neurophysiology and behavior on a time scale of minutes, and 2) that some mechanisms of synaptic modulation in non-reproductive parts of the brain, including in the hippocampus, differ between the sexes. These differences include “latent” sex differences in which a particular stimulus produces the same outcome in males and females but acts through distinct underlying mechanisms in each sex. The discovery of latent sex differences suggests that some molecular mechanisms targeted for drug development may differ between males and females even in the absence of a sex difference in behavior or disease. Currently, my lab is seeking to map the distribution of estrogen receptors throughout the brain without limitations posed by anti-estrogen receptor antibodies. We have generated targeted knock-in mice in which each of the classical estrogen receptors is expressed from its endogenous locus as a fusion protein with a fluorescent marker. These mice reveal interesting patterns of estrogen receptor protein expression in the brain of both sexes and may help to resolve some conflicts in the existing literature.

The full CV for this candidate can be found within the ballot.