It is our great pleasure to announce that Dr. Manuel A. Castro-Alamancos has joined the Department of Neuroscience as Professor of Neuroscience and the Janice and Rodney Reynolds Endowed Chair in Neurobiology on June 19, 2020. Dr. Castro-Alamancos received his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University Complutense in Madrid, Spain, and his MS in Psychobiology and PhD in Neuroscience from the Cajal Institute and University Complutense. He did his postdoctoral training at Brown University, studying short-term synaptic enhancement and long-term potentiation in the thalamocortical pathway. In 1998, he began his Assistant Professorship at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University in Canada. He became an Associate Professor in 2002 and Professor in 2006 at Drexel University. He is currently funded by R35 and R01 NIH grants to study the synaptic, cellular and network mechanisms involved in sensorimotor information transmission, coding and storage during motivated behaviors. His work has implications for neurological and psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, addiction, autism, Parkinson’s and epilepsy. His studies have been published in Science, Neuron, PNAS and the Journal of Neuroscience. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Neuroscience. Dr. Castro-Alamancos is not only a highly productive scientist but also a collaborative and easy-going individual. He enjoys teaching and mentoring students. Several of his lab staff will be moving with him, including Sebastian Hormigo, Ji Zhou and Bharani Shanmugasundaram. Dr. Hormigo completed his PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, and he will join the Department as Instructor.

We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Castro-Alamancos and his lab members to the Department of Neuroscience, and look forward to more of his exciting research and medical education at UConn Health.

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