Contact Information
1327A Beckman Institute
M/C 251
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Interests
Neurobiology of emotional learning and memory; Fear and anxiety; Psychopathology; Synaptic plasticity
Education
Biological Sciences (Neurobiology), PhD, University of Southern California
Psychology, BS, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Awards and Honors
Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, American Psychological Association (APA), 2001
Fellow, American Psychological Association (APA), 2004
Fellow, Association for Psychological Science (APS), 2009
D. O. Hebb Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, American Psychological Association (APA) (Division 6), 2017
Gantt Medal, Pavlovian Society, 2019
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2023
Additional Campus Affiliations
Director, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Professor, Psychology
Professor, Biomedical and Translational Sciences
Affiliate, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
External Links
Highlighted Publications
Totty, M. S., Tuna, T., Ramanathan, K. R., Jin, J., Peters, S. E., & Maren, S. (2023). Thalamic nucleus reuniens coordinates prefrontal-hippocampal synchrony to suppress extinguished fear. Nature communications, 14(1), Article 6565. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42315-1
Bayer, H., Hassell, J. E., Oleksiak, C. R., Garcia, G. M., Vaughan, H. L., Juliano, V. A. L., & Maren, S. (2024). Pharmacological stimulation of infralimbic cortex after fear conditioning facilitates subsequent fear extinction. Neuropsychopharmacology, 49(13), 1951-1957. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-024-01961-9
Ressler, R. L., Goode, T. D., Kim, S., Ramanathan, K. R., & Maren, S. (2021). Covert capture and attenuation of a hippocampus-dependent fear memory. Nature Neuroscience, 24(5), 677-684. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-021-00825-5
Giustino, T. F., Ramanathan, K. R., Totty, M. S., Miles, O. W., & Maren, S. (2020). Locus coeruleus norepinephrine drives stress-induced increases in basolateral amygdala firing and impairs extinction learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 40(4), 907-916. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1092-19.2019
Marek, R., Jin, J., Goode, T. D., Giustino, T. F., Wang, Q., Acca, G. M., Holehonnur, R., Ploski, J. E., Fitzgerald, P. J., Lynagh, T., Lynch, J. W., Maren, S., & Sah, P. (2018). Hippocampus-driven feed-forward inhibition of the prefrontal cortex mediates relapse of extinguished fear. Nature Neuroscience, 21(3), 384-392. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0073-9
Recent Publications
Bayer, H., Bertoglio, L. J., Maren, S., & Stern, C. A. J. (2025). Windows of change: Revisiting temporal and molecular dynamics of memory reconsolidation and persistence. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 174, Article 106198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106198
Hassell, J. E., Arellano Perez, A. D., Vasudevan, K., Ressler, R. L., Garcia, G. M., Parr, M., Vierkant, V. M., Bayer, H., & Maren, S. (2025). Hippocampal ensembles regulate circuit-induced relapse of extinguished fear. Molecular Psychiatry, Article 6565. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-025-03064-3
Liu, J., Totty, M. S., Bayer, H., & Maren, S. (2025). Integrating Aversive Memories in the Basolateral Amygdala. Biological Psychiatry. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2025.03.019
Tucker, A., Baltazar, A., Eisdorfer, J. T., Thackray, J. K., Vo, K., Thomas, H., Tandon, A., Moses, J., Singletary, B., Gillespie, T., Smith, A., Pauken, A., Nadella, S., Pitonak, M., Letchuman, S., Jang, J., Totty, M., Jalufka, F. L., Aceves, M., ... Dulin, J. N. (2025). Functional synaptic connectivity of engrafted spinal cord neurons with locomotor circuitry in the injured spinal cord. (bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology). https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.05.644402
Tuna, T., Totty, M. S., Badarnee, M., Afonso Gonçalves Mourão, F., Peters, S., Milad, M. R., & Maren, S. (2025). Associative coding of conditioned fear in the thalamic nucleus reuniens in rodents and humans. (bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology). https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.18.643915