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Ja Eun Choi
Neurosciences Postdoctoral Scholar
Brain Resilience Track
Department of Psychiatry
Ja Eun Choi is a postdoctoral fellow in Neir Eshel’s lab at Stanford University and a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Brain Resilience Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Seoul National University, where she studied how dopaminergic neurons regulate social behavior following acute social isolation. Now, her research asks how sleep disruption escalates aggression and how aging shapes the brain’s resilience to this stressor. She focuses on serotonergic and dopaminergic circuit dynamics in the lateral septum, combining fiber photometry of serotonin/dopamine signals, EEG sleep recordings, and circuit-specific manipulations to understand how sleep disruption acts as a trigger.